Shameless Friend
All Black That Sparkles
(Tape Gun, 2015)
B-
There are no wrong moves in noise music. That would necessitate rules. And by design, this arm of experimental songwriting doesn’t dare bog itself down with any. It’s most often about the very act of creating an experience, and the listener is the one who decides what the experience is.
Some albums are accidentally good or purposefully bad. Others are pretty for pretty’s sake, gut-wrenching, ear-splitting or towering. But the ones you want to experience tend to be made made by musicians who know the brain can’t function if there’s no heart running blood up to it. Aesthetic-driven is fine, but how much more can that be than moody set pieces tastefully arranged but dead as a store display window? Without a narrative, it’s a backdrop … and can there really be a journey with no figure leading the way?
That affliction is one that Shameless Friend, the namesake of Norman noise conductor Laine Bergeron, most often evades. He’s a storyteller who swaps words for fleeting guitar notes and low-droning fuzz, creating a picture for listeners to decipher themselves — though it has its constraints. It’s no sports drama score anchored by climatic crescendos. This isn’t the music for the first kiss, the comeback win or the vindicated drive into the sunset toward a newfound destiny. But neither is it a fevered, disquieting eruption intended to rock your sanity way. What it might be is the soundtrack to the quiet revelations made on a late-night walk on an overcast Thursday — a series of small shifts and rumbles, not a seismic upheaval of everything you’ve ever known.
The title All Black That Sparkles hints at something astronomical, but it’s hard to tell if it’s actually deep space or something more subterranean. It’s distant no matter what, and songs like “Flickering Bodies” and “Dark Energy” rustle with the subtlest sense of activity, be them faintly heard through a near-cosmic vacuum or just reverberating from miles of crust directly overhead. Dark and unknown, it’s an ill-fated endeavor to decipher exactly what shadowy form is buried inside them. But peering into that pitch black, it’s obvious something is there.
Slow to build and slow to fall, every sound is incremental; they decay away or slide into the foreground, making purposeful movements that rarely read as random or coerced. By design, the album prods along with little flash or editing, moving in uncompromising real time (“All Light That Dissolves,” “Memory Becomes Solid”). Jump a minute ahead in any track and you aren’t guaranteed to hear something substantially different. It’s frustrating if you are seeking to experience a lot in a little time, rewarding if you just want to experience a little deeply, as you will in opener “Most of What Is.”
It’s exacting in that way. But is it sleepy or purposeful? Assured or overconfident? For some, it’s a snapshot of a landscape destined for a dusty photo album. For others, a terrain begging to be explored inch by inch. No matter, it’s something you can feel yourself living in. And be that a moment or more, it’s vital in a way only a select few of his ilk are able to achieve.
