San Francisco duo Barn Owl operates in the thick pungent murky world of drone music, crafting alternatively melancholic and triumphant slabs of searing sound into the ether. It’s noise music by way of ambience, synth experimentalism by way of musique concrete, minimal electronics by way of mutant film score.
There’ something about the way they approach the drones though. There’ a level of density here, a thick soup, which is often warm and all encompassing, though within it you’ll hear instruments pushed to their limits, crackling, buzzing and peaking out under the strain of the enveloping whole.
There’ also often a throbbing groove, a dub reference, their self-styled doom dub that provides, not just a certain sense of musicality, particularly when working alongside some of the other electrics and ethereal sounds, but also a sense of movement within the stasis. This is perhaps their biggest point of difference with other doom merchants, the desire to develop musical communities not just living in but prospering within the shadow of the drones.
Recorded by Phil Manley (Trans Am), for their fifth album they’ve continued their move beyond guitars, focussing more heavily on electronics and synthesizer, which is a real point of departure from previous outings. The 6 tracks here really push their sonic envelope, where guitars take a step back and the synthetic textures are pushed to the fore. Nowhere is this more apparent than the seventeen and a half minute final track The Opulent Decline, which begins as strange uncomfortable DIY sound design and gradually builds into a slow sensual pulsing groove that is gradually overtaken by chaos and density. There’s a moment about ten minutes in when the searing spectre of washed out sound feels like it’s coming in waves, just periodically gathering strength before washing over you again and the results are nothing short of transcendental.
They’re masters of the steady imperceptible build, slowly attaching barnacles to their sounds until over time their music becomes a searing rash of triumphant emotion. In fact like all good drone music Barn Owl seems to plug effortlessly into the receptors of the brain, yet where most drone music tends to disappear leaving the listener to contemplate their self constructed reverie, Barn Owl is too damn interesting to ever really fade from consciousness.
