Anduin – Stolen Years (SMTG Ltd.)
Plenty of albums have been created under adverse circumstances. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – life’s mayhem can inject an element of chaos and unpredictability into a recording session, or at the very least provide a good back story. But in the case of Jonathan Lee, the man behind Anduin, the story is more frustrating and sad than compelling. Lee was putting the finishing touches on Stolen Years when his house was broken into and much of his musical equipment was stolen, including the laptop on which he had kept backups of the recordings he had done thus far. But despite the circumstances of its re-creation, the fact that the album exists at all is cause for celebration, not just for the adversity overcome by re-recording all of it, but also that it’s a great album, easily the best thing Lee has done under this moniker.
Anduin – Stolen Years (SMTG Ltd.)
Plenty of albums have been created under adverse circumstances. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – life’s mayhem can inject an element of chaos and unpredictability into a recording session, or at the very least provide a good back story. But in the case of Jonathan Lee, the man behind Anduin, the story is more frustrating and sad than compelling. Lee was putting the finishing touches on Stolen Years when his house was broken into and much of his musical equipment was stolen, including the laptop on which he had kept backups of the recordings he had done thus far. But despite the circumstances of its re-creation, the fact that the album exists at all is cause for celebration, not just for the adversity overcome by re-recording all of it, but also that it’s a great album, easily the best thing Lee has done under this moniker.
Previous Anduin albums had seen an attempt to balance subdued electronic elements with acoustic instruments and incidental background sound, with each release seeming slightly more confident in this combination than its predecessor, and Stolen Years is no exception. Opener “Behind the Voyeur’s Wall of Glass” starts with sonic elements that should be familiar to anybody acquainted with previous Anduin albums – hushed tapping and creaking sounds gradually form a percussive pattern that underpins minimal sweeping synthesizer patterns, but overtop of this, the addition of Jimmy Ghaphery’s saxophone gives the song an eerie, film noir edge. [A brief side rant: Almost every write-up I’ve seen for this album employs some reference to David Lynch. It’s as if, every time a saxophone shows up on a song that’s at all sinister, the only image that manages to pop into anybody’s mind is goddamn Michael Anderson dancing around in a red suit and talking backwards. I know people are trying to come up with some reasonable frame of reference, maybe even attempting to show off their abilities to draw parallels across different forms of media, but come on.] Ghaphery’s sax playing pops up on several of the other songs on the album, lending each a visceral quality that’s distinct not only from Lee’s other work but from legions of other electronic musicians, who either stay away from live instrumentation or incorporate it in ways that seem more clinical and detatched.
What Lee achieves with the electronic elements is equally impressive, crafting an atmosphere that doesn’t seem to belong to any specific era. Some of the synthesizer patterns don’t sound far from Vangelis or Popul Vuh, but with a more focused, less grandiose quality. The songs aren’t especially harmonically active, but they’re too concise to fall in with ambient music’s more drone-influenced fringes. And while some of the rhythmic elements bear a similarity to glitchier electronic music, there’s an inviting warmth even to the album’s darkest songs that separates it from the work of legions of other laptop knob-twiddlers and button-pushers. It may be the incorporation of acoustic instruments, or it may be the use of background sound that sends the listener into a sort of psychoacoustic hole in which the snippets of ambient (not as in the genre term) sound form a cohesive environmental portrait that helps the music evoke a sense of place. Regardless of the exact root, it’s a compelling middle ground that doesn’t align it too closely with any particular sub-genre of electronic music, allowing it to stand on its own considerable merits.
Words by Graham Scala
Anduin Photo by Shaun Aigner-Lee
