High Plains - Cinderland Album

The post-industrial landscape of Syracuse, NY, finds itself stunned by a deluge of aggressive thunderstorms. The terrifying gusts of wind induce a sense of dread and surrender. Mark Bridges’ cello and Scott Morgan’s electronics morph with each other in my studio to bring forth a sonorous deluge of waves that, as if by beautiful coincidence, meditate on the torrential rain reshaping the world outside. With tender dilapidation and ecstatic lonesomeness, Cinderland summons a sense of the other-worldly. The duo’s choice of the phrase High Plains to represent their sound feels more like an inevitability than a choice. It is as if there are soundscapes that are always waiting for their authors, who would appropriately summon and showcase the “beyondness” that music brings to practitioners and lovers.

Cinderland is an album for serious listeners of ambient and neoclassical music, although categories are sometimes products of lazy imagination or hasty generalizations. Thus Cinderland could as well be an album for the serious listeners of rain and Ansel Adam’s photographs (as the cover art might suggest), or, for the tea harvesting women at the Himalayan foothills and the immaculate fog that wraps their baskets.

This album could as well be a “Song for the Last Night” as the brilliantly executed out-track suggests. The plucked vibration of an oscillating and organ-ic midi type chord repeats and disperses into a subcutaneous hum (well if you are listening with good quality subs). The cello emerges as if to guide itself through this barebone structure. Wisps of vanishing violins, willy-nilly, reveal their surreptitious nature intertwining the cello movement as if to show how a melody has to collect pollen from other melodies.

“Blood that Ran the Rapids,” is a hyperreal piece, as in, it creates a new sense of reality through different levels of magnification and manipulations of the audible universe. You might find yourself navigating a simulated “post world” earth, or a “post-human” world, where the forests have grown back to their stunning beauty, and from the caverns of doleful and bulging melodies, flashes of crescendoed sounds crash like bright sunlight and wind. The slow limping beat keeps your avatar rowing with a wooden beat as you move onto the wonderlands of “The Dusk Pines”- the very next track (1.3). From behind the vast unknown branches of sounds like shimmering trees, shows us the deep dense forest that always lies inside a masterful rendition of a cello. The electronics and the cello here become inseparable tools of sculpting pathways to the remote regions of the amygdala. The harmonic swelling and beautiful mourning of strings hover above the shimmering flutter of low drones, and I know that this is how the rains and forests, and rainforests might sounds, even when no human might is there to appreciate its beauty.

I found my self mixing “The Dusk Pines” with tracks from Black Earth made by Bohren & cub der Gore (as you will find in the mix titled “Rain of Rivers,” hosted here in Quietcalmrecords.com). As a fellow traveler, I feel, it would have been great if the vinyl release included the specifics of the electronic machinery with which Scott Morgan unleashes his wizardry or a small blurb about the creative process by which the cello sounded larger than a cave. But this is too much to ask from a album that gives and gives.

If you don’t have Cinderland yet, rectify that mistake. I can’t put it otherwise.

BEAUTIFUL !