Comaduster
Memory Echoes
self-released
Réal Cardinal’s Comaduster has never been easy to pin down; while the music made by the Canadian sound designer, producer and performer includes elements of IDM, industrial, breaks, synthpop and various stripes of post-rock and abstract metal, the whole is easier to understand if you approach it agnostically, engaging with the heady themes and feelings of each album. Like its predecessors, the long-awaited new record Memory Echoes has a complex science fiction conceit that lands conceptually somewhere between Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, but it’s less narrative than it is a framework for the album’s design, and the experience of its creation. In broad terms, Cardinal has made a record that is collapsing into itself; granular, non-linear, expansive, and emotional, often all at the same time.
What that means musically is that each piece of Memory Echoes reflects the shape of the whole, in ways that are both easily identified and almost eerily subconscious. Even a casual listen to the record will reveal moments of synergy, such as how “Wavelike”‘s flurry of microscopic glitches resolving into its melody mirrors the way the intensely arranged percussion and vocals of “Signal to Nether” derezz, revealing the shape of the song behind them. Then again, the implosion of the time stretched drone metal climax of “Liminal Zero” giving way to the clean simplicity of the opening moments of “Way With Me” is instinctual, one of the record’s numerous instances of musical datamoshing that feel uncannily natural.
That’s probably the secret of how the project’s impossibly precise sound manipulation and vast soundscapes don’t end up completely alienating the listener; you can navigate your way through the inside of a Comaduster LP on emotion and instinct alone. The way that the title track expands, contracts and then turns inside out into something entirely different is a feat of arrangement no doubt, but it’s the wistfulness of the melancholy vocal that threads the musical needle. And while Cardinal’s lyrics are more self-referential and interwoven than at any time in the past, his delivery is intensely open and vulnerable, whether comparatively unadorned or processed and layered, sung simply or yowled with throat shredding intensity. Comaduster’s albums have always been worlds unto themselves, but where Memory Echoes excels is in allowing the listener not just to visit and observe its vistas and peaks, but to inhabit it.
Hence why the album’s numerous guest performances sound so organic. Seeming’s Alex Reed intones “The less you know the better/There’s a hole in history/that holds it all together”, words that are as distinct and characteristic of his own material as anything he’s ever written, but contain within them the essence of everything that precedes and follows. And while collaborator Mari Kattman is no stranger to Comaduster, the way her voice is woven into the disintegrating folk of “Black Sun Rays”, and how she corrals the disparate elements of “Homeward” through the power of her voice, and the confidence of her self-penned lyrics is unprecedented. Across the record, guitars courtesy of Elijah Hennig and Réal’s father Webb come in and out of focus, sometimes staving off the encroaching swarms of digital artifacting, sometimes becoming them before dissipating into the ether, as integral as any programmed drum part or automated modulation.
For everything that Cardinal achieves as technician and designer, and as a songwriter and a performer, his triumph here is in how he erases the artificial distinctions between those disciplines; occupying the nexus of inspiration and virtuosity, the purity of purpose displayed here deconstructs and recreates that intersection as a singularity. Multitudinous, harmonious and with numerous pathways through which to experience it, Memory Echoes is an immense, and endlessly engrossing musical achievement. Highly recommended.
