Caldon Glover
The Barren Gospel
Cryo Chamber
Caldon Glover’s work over the past six or seven years has freely moved around the expanses linking the likes of drone, field recordings, dark ambient, and general experimentation. While several of their recent releases for Cryo Chamber have been easy to approach through the dark ambient framework with which that label’s associated, new LP The Barren Gospel brings the earthy, tactile textures which distinguished Glover’s earlier work back into focus while also aiming for a concept which draws upon but also inverts dark ambient traditions.
Frankly, there’s often something distinctly American in the dusty, windswept, and sometimes clattering details of Glover’s work, and that’s a rare tone in a field which often goes out of its way to eschew modern history altogether (and please note I mean “American” in the sense of Nebraska or an updating of Flannery O’Connor’s southern gothic to suit that nation’s current war on its own working class). And while The Barren Gospel might not be as explicitly social or political as previous Glover releases like The Mundane or Shambles, the promo copy describes a reactionary swing towards the worship of chaos (or possibly the likes of Azathoth) in response to environmental/economic malaise and despair. That’s the sort of high concept reworking of weird fiction and Coast To Coast AM tropes which dark ambient rarely has the guts or inventiveness to tackle, but it makes for a record which seems like the sort of work Glover’s entire career to date has primed them for.
While deep drones which shift so slowly their harmonics barely register thread through The Barren Gospel, the constant stream of more distinct elements skittering atop their surface draws the ear and keeps the aforementioned ethos of the record in focus. Crackled samples (connoting any number of recent true crime/paranormal docs), far-off feedback squalls, and indecipherable patinas of clicks and shuffles (campfires? footsteps in the woods?) make for decidedly embodied listening which never settles into a “just hit play and space out” mood. The kosmische horror and dread imparted by the detuned modular drones and phases which carry the record to its conclusion on “The Dissolve” are far more Carpenter soundtrack (think Prince Of Darkness) than dark ambient.
As is often the case with high concept records short on lyrics, we can debate the degree to which these pieces in and of themselves communicate the specific themes and questions Glover is shooting for, but again, you don’t need to be a dark ambient hierophant to feel the disquiet and agita The Barren Gospel‘s world conjures. And that world has some interesting questions for us, prompting us to ask whether the likes of the Hopkinsville goblins and Mothman are the primeval horrors of nature or our own subconscious which we imagine we have left in the past, or, like most of us, merely the cast-off jetsam of an economic ideology growing increasingly hostile to all life, cryptid and human alike.
