More and more the sounds of degradation and decay exist in simpatico with the sounds of water. If the loop already suggests the flowing of the tide then gaps in the cycle wrought or wreaked through time might imply a kind of erosion.
Tyler Gilmore who produces music under the monicker BlankFor.ms utilises degradation in the manner of William Basinski, whose Disintegration Loops arose when he attempted to digitise a collection of found sounds which he had recorded to magnetic tape in the eighties. As each recording passed the tape head the magnetic ferrite steadily detached from its plastic backing and rather than halting the process, he instead captured the new strains that these tapes made as they continued to deteriorate, looping over an extended period until they became mere spectres.
Basinski supposedly finished his project on the morning of the September 11 attacks in New York City and later described his process and effect, saying ‘I’m recording the life and death of a melody. It just made me think of human beings, you know, and how we die’. The loop though so long as it retains even a vestige of what came before might also evoke the cycle of life and a kind of genealogical thread however blurred or mislaid or disoriented.
For his new record BlankFor.ms navigated or surfeited his usual palette of degraded tapes, analogue synthesizers and a spinet piano, emptying out early drum machine sketches and stacking tape loops to construct what is described as a ‘complex rhythmical biography’. The work was composed in the aftermath of two seismic events, the birth of his first child in November of 2023 and the death of his mother the following January after a two-year battle with cancer.
Processing those moments and their ever-present he appears to have adopted a certain pioneering spirit. A native of the Wind River region of Wyoming, his song titles contain references to peaks and summits and the homesteader Augustus Franklin Crail who left an historic ranch in nearby Montana. There is also a ‘Kinship’ triptych named for the yoga studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles where BlankFor.ms reunited with his fellow producer Colloboh and performed to a routine by the yogi Meg Shoemaker, resulting in the three miniatures which he assembled for this album.
Most of all though After the Town Was Swept Away seems to steep and to some extent cleanse itself in visions and metaphors of water, the songs which lie at the heart of the album titled variously ‘To Survive the Flood’, ‘Formed by the Slide’, ‘After the Town Was Swept Away’ and ‘Ferried Across’ which immediately conjures to my mind the folk tune ‘The Water Is Wide’ or ‘O Waly, Waly’ and its opening lines ‘The water is wide / I cannot cross over / and nor have I the wings to fly’.
Water and despair and decay will continue to go hand in hand as we face the precipitous effects of global warming, which has brought more storms and rising seas with 1.81 billion or almost a quarter of the world’s population now thought to be at significant risk from flooding. It can feed our crops and quench our thirst or cause scrabbles for land wherever it’s scarce, and while it cleanses or washes away in myth and fact it can cover up vast constructions and edifices, whose remnants and memories remain like so much flotsam and jetsam bobbing on the surface.
After the Town Was Swept Away opens through what sounds like an old encrusted lullaby, uncovered from built-up layers of strata and sediment. It segues into ‘A Fleet of Celebrants’ a term which dots works of fantasy and science fiction from The Stormlight Archive to Warhammer to Elden Ring. Instead of a festive dance however this fleet is engaged in a stern if stately march, which is briefly circled by a curiously sweet flurry of woodwinds courtesy of the saxophonist Remy Le Boeuf who leads his own band and recently featured on New Strategies for Modern Crime Vol.1 & Vol.2 with a kindred spirit to BlankFor.ms in the producer Prefuse 73. Here the trudging retinue only ever seems to get so far, as if glitching back on itself in which context the woodwinds too may be just a mirage like the perception of water on a hot road or a Fata Morgana.
‘Crail Family Post Office’ shows some of Gilmore’s own roots in jazz, house and drum ‘n’ bass. In line with Promises by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra where a seven-note motif from the electronic musician laid the ground for a spectral farewell and the Motor City rhythms of the drummer and beatmaker Gerald Cleaver, or similar trio albums on Red Hook Records which pitched together Wadada Leo Smith, Andrew Cyrille and Qasim Naqvi on modular synthesizer or Bill Frisell, Cyrille and the organist Kit Downes, for the fall of 2023 the fledgeling label – established by the former ECM producer Sun Chung – teamed up BlankFor.ms with the pianist Jason Moran, his former teacher in jazz composition at the New England Conservatory, and the drummer Marcus Gilmore (apparently no relation) for the acclaimed alchemies of Refract. If that album honed some of his improvisational instincts, the way BlankFor.ms handles his tape loops on After the Town Was Swept Away is reminiscent of an organist pushing in and pulling out those gasping stops.
‘Kinship I’ is more austere and reverent, a respectful bow, a steeped ritual and a swift journey through kaleidoscopic time. ‘To Survive the Flood’ is an album standout and one of the record’s most atmospheric compositions with its glacial tread and temperate winds. If some of the other pieces call to mind turn of the century electronic music by Drexciya or the glitch pioneers Thomas Knak and Oval, with ‘To Survive the Flood’ we are in Vespertine territory especially on mid-album tracks like ‘Aurora’ with their music box melodies and microbeats. Redolent of Bjƶrk in more than texture, ‘To Survive the Flood’ is an enveloping and comforting track which still carries a kind of chill enough to keep the hairs stiffened down the forearms and at the nape of one’s neck.
‘Unfurled Atop the Peak’ appears to dally in rock pools with only a reflection of the summit until the music slowly begins to scale the mountain head. And the lead single ‘Formed by the Slide’ offers the second collaboration on After the Town Was Swept Away as the lulling and undulating vocal coos of Ella Joy Meir carry over limpid piano keys and a shrugging backbeat. Squelching, slouching and shimmying ‘Formed by the Slide’ is not quite warm-blooded but abounds in tender human sentiment before Meir’s voice is caught and suspended mid sigh or coo to stretch out quaveringly through ‘Kinship II’. The effect is as if to show the delicate and heart-pricked tentativeness of our relationships, a strong but slender twining thread.
Befitting the title piece, ‘After the Town Was Swept Away’ is a sunken dirge whose lowing sounds blare over a dull thudding beat. Evoking at first distant foghorn blasts, a kind of gritty and grainy swooshing sound begins to overtake the mix like the dredging of silt or the sweeping of sandy sediment. That noise gets more scratchy and agitated until it confronts the listener up-close as if clawing at the visual screen, before giving way to a drum ‘n’ bass breakdown as the record for the first time looses its tethers. Unshackled and unconstrained, the result is not necessarily pretty nor is it meant to be as ‘After the Town Was Swept Away’ finally segues into industrial textures, warped and juddering until it draws to a halt.
Through more amorphous shapes, ‘Colter’ retains some of the same texture, a billowing swell of massed static or a wire mesh moving through the sky with pneumatic grace, artful yet agonising as it darkens the surrounds and redolent of Max Richter or Grouper for its burnished finesse.
On the other hand ‘Ferried Across’ at first reminds me of Blood Orange with its airy tentativeness, until a slurping and slurrying beat adds a bit of momentum to proceedings. As the composition progresses those beats begin to sound volcanic, the effect like a molten ooze which takes down all of the trees which lie in its way leaving a glowing if now barren landscape. And having traversed such mottled tundra ‘Kinship III’ affords a moment of rest, an oscillating and gently vacillating throb that ties together some of the record’s themes of trudging grief and tender hopefulness, taking all of that in and just letting it sit.
