Review Summary: Songs for ghosts
Jun Konagaya is hardly a stranger to melancholy, even under his most perverse artistic guise. Grim’s music, in spite of its animalistic depravity, is often offset by touches of hymn-like tranquility and subdued longing, of a kind of naïve innocence that acts as a Janus-like second face to Jun’s artistic persona. If you’ve read John Gardner’s Grendel, you might see something of that woeful misanthrope in Grim’s music, in the ragged, raging savagery contrasted against the outsider’s longing to belong. Travel sees Konagaya shedding much of the perverse misanthropy of his main project in favor of that melancholic mood, of a faded, threadbare nostalgia that recalls a pensive distance, both physical and temporal.
The music on much of
Travel feels like finding a collection of faded old photographs in a dusty attic somewhere, so faded that their subject is rendered ghostly and ambiguous. The music is sparse, repetitive, organs, synths, spare metallic clangs and chugging steam engines smothered in dust and left to mummify in the heat. The austerity of it all lends it much of its spectral quality, the rudimentary keyboards and repeated guitar arpeggios, the smothering dryness of the production, the naïve church-hymn organs all contribute to its cryptic nostalgia. The image of Hopi women, stretched and blurred, that adorns the cover of the album extends this theme, distorted faces and stretched limbs made mysterious and ghostly.
Much of
Travel’s charm is, unfortunately, best exemplified by opener Sanctuary, which sets warbling, somber female choral vocals against the dust-coated artlessness of Jun’s church organ keyboard effects before being buried in the massive, glacial chug of a resting steam engine. It’s a near-perfect song, its hulking, post-industrial beauty setting the standard so high that the rest of the album struggles slightly to live up to that initial promise. Following tracks Contact and Float are worthy enough additions to Jun’s catalogue, the latter’s creeping shudder underlayed by Jun’s garbled raving and the former’s flooding layer of fuzz and melancholy all underscore that sense of nostalgic ghostliness set down by the rest of the album, but their progression is more content with layering elements than with adding them, with adding fuzz to fuzz and letting the trickle turn into a cascade of sound. It’s all lovely, and in keeping with the mood of the rest of the album, but sonically it becomes a bit one-note, a bit empty compared to what’s been set up by Sanctuary.
But if the rest of the album struggles to live up to Sanctuary’s promise, that’s only a slight blow against it. And surely Jun couldn’t keep all the decrepit bombast of that track going for the length of an entire album without it becoming cheap. After all, penultimate track Pilgrim ends up being the other great highlight of the album by precisely taking the opposite tack, its music-box chimes and clacking clockwork pulse evoking a sense of childlike wonder before giving way to Jun’s more Grim-like tendencies as mangled electronic pulses and layers of vocal raving irresistibly pummel the senses. But if the album doesn’t manage to quite live up to those two highlights, it still remains committed to the mood and atmosphere dictated by them, and even if the sparseness can occasionally appear threadbare rather than elegant, Jun constructs his atmosphere so well that the occasional overstretched passage doesn’t rankle so much as make one wish for the more overt brilliance of Sanctuary and Pilgrim. It’s all worth the time put into it in the end, but the value ends up being a bit uneven. Regardless, if a sense of mystic nostalgia is the kind of mood that you’d like to spend some time in, there are few who do it better than its done here.
