Ian Nagoski - Effortless Battle
(Recorded)
In an interview I recently read, Baltimore musician Ian Nagoski cites electrical transformers and cicadas as strong musical influences on his work, two sound making entities that people come in contact with almost daily during some periods of life, but objects that most people wouldn't be willing to concentrate on for anything more than a few minutes. This information in indispensable when examining Nagoski's music, as its ambient, slowly developing nature makes works like this disc's second track, "Ripped Steam Hinterland" a similar listening experience. One might say it's too quiet, too static, or just not worth the focus with which one must approach it, but, to a listener who's willing to dedicate their ears to the sound, the track, and the album as a whole, is a rewarding and transporting listen.
Effortless Battle begins with the disc's thirty-one minute title track, the soundtrack to a Catherine Pancake film of the same name. It begins with a very subdued, but dense fluttering, but nearly five minutes in, Nagoski utilizes a buzz which pans from left to right so vigorously that its circular motion seems almost baroque (by Nagoski's standards, of course). Slowly, though, a more constant tone takes control, a sound that makes up the majority of the rest of the track. Vaporous sounds slowly emerge from below, and the music swells in intensity. What follows is a gelatinous ebb and flow of tones, a woven ribbon of sound in constant, but subtle, movement. For upwards of twenty minutes, "Effortless Battle" twists and turns ever so slightly, shifting the focus smoothly from one thread of sound to another. As the end of the track nears, the music becomes a cloudy haze that only relents as the end of the track nears and a more placid tone returns, one with the hidden vestiges of a melody of which only hints can be heard through the rest of the viscous mass.
"Ripped Steam Hinterland," the CD's second track, is a product of Daniel Conrad's Wild Wave. Conrad, usually known as a purveyor of light-based visual art, created the Wild Wave by building tone generators which, when activated, set the instruments' metal plates to vibrating. Fifteen minutes long, the track slowly swells from near silence to an insistent but unobtrusive, thickly layered, hum. Almost completely static at first listen, it's easily comparable to the surprisingly ornate ambient sounds created by appliances or the aforementioned transformers. What sounds like a constant hum contains, like an anthill, a great deal of unseen activity, and close listening reveals undulations and ghostly vibrations that might otherwise go unnoticed. There's a whole world of organic warmth, buzzing activity, and ethereal beauty in Effortless Battle, one must simply be willing to immerse themselves deep enough into the music to experience it fully. Those who do will be well rewarded.
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