s:cage
We End in a Beautiful Mess
Artoffact Records
It’s been almost twenty years since Canadian technoid producer Stephen Seto’s last album as s:cage, Madness Turns to Glass was released. Comparing that record’s post-millennial rhythmic noise by way of idm sound with this year’s We End in a Beautiful Mess is instructive; they’re stylistically comparable, but the lush and mechanical textures that make up Seto’s songwriting toolkit are rendered in higher fidelity, allowing the emotion of the songs to come through with resonant clarity.
As alluded to in the album’s liner notes, We End in a Beautiful Mess is largely concerned with the feelings of loss, grief, anger and acceptance brought on by the death of Seto’s father, a fact that informs how the instrumental tracks match emotionally with their intricate design. Songs like “this ember FADING” with its inaudible vocal samples and delicately modulated synth lead have an air of sadness and apprehension to them, but its the slow swell of reverb and digital noise that emerges from that simple foundation that inform its melancholy. Elsewhere, the anxious, fast-moving sequences and thudding distorted kicks of “primal (and we BREAK)” are all the more unnerving for how they circle the song’s ghostly melodic center, conjuring an unease that’s hard to pinpoint.
That marriage of emotion and design is s:cage’s great strength as a producer, the impact of each musical element informed by the space around them. There’s plenty of discord in the mechanical rhythm of the album’s title track, but when supplemented with the drifting bells, it achieves a kind of fraught harmony, the proximity of each sound bringing out further timbres and textures that would not be apparent on their own. Seto reinforces this by often letting certain elements stand on their own for a stanza or two before bringing in their accompaniment to change their shape; the Gridlock-esque flurry of shredded noise on “into ASH” first appears in a void of reverb, the slow build of rich, flowing pads around them reshaping them into something that is somehow uplifting.
There’s no denying that We End in a Beautiful Mess is a heavy record in many ways; it starts with the sound of a life support machine and ends abruptly with a disintegrating swarm of drones, uncertain and fragmented. But then, that’s also what makes it’s moments of beauty and catharsis so much more impactful. It’s not an easy record to parse by design, the exploration of its myriad corridors making it all the more affecting and rewarding as a listening experience, s:cage articulating something beautiful through the chaos and heartbreak of loss.
