By It’s our Bandcamp Pick of the Week, featuring the rigid rhythms and digital imperfections of Liam Aldous’ NO CITY COULD SOUND!
Liam Aldous – NO CITY COULD SOUND
Genres: Ambient Pop, Glitch
Favorite Tracks: “Advice,” “Bright Times (From The Future),” “Walk On Top Of Me”
For an album that’s so unabashedly enamored with the rigid rhythms of glitches and skipping CDs, NO CITY COULD SOUND is achingly tender. It would be easy to attribute it to the instrumentation that fills the stereo field throughout: subdued strings, sun-bleached guitars, slushed-out harmonica. It’s a far cry from Aldous’ first album, OSOU, which played with tiny slices of sound and the vast space between them to evoke a gentle, meditative mood. But more than anything else, it’s actually the digital sound design here that makes the album so comforting.
The advent of software-based glitch music and the minimal electronic music of the early aughts was a cornerstone for the album’s development. Fennesz’s ENDLESS SUMMER and VENICE both come to mind, but I’m also reminded of the grainy storms of sound in Dorine_Muraille’s MANI and the sedate lull of Jan Jelinek’s LOOP-FINDING-JAZZ-RECORDS. Their warmth isn’t offset or contrasted by the unfeeling tools that conjured them—it’s an extension. For as pop-oriented a NO CITY COULD SOUND is, compared to its spiritual forebears, the ethos is the same. Every click, every resonant synth, and every blink-and-you-miss-it rush of static creates a patchwork so rich it is almost tactile. Even at their most dense and unkempt, these compositions deliver themselves as gently as ocean waves lapping at the shore.
This doesn’t mean it’s an album built for passive listening. Mellow, yes, but never stationary or languid. The most immediately ear-catching element in the mix is Aldous’ voice, either plainly bared—as it is on the dream pop of “Walk On Top Of Me”—or processed within an inch of its life, like in the twinkling “Advice” or the near-waltz of “Stealing Time.” Sometimes digitalism steals the show, like in “O Big 6 Sky” when the chorus comes back a second time alongside an IDM beat so absurdly heavy it’s hard to not immediately start bobbing your head to it; or in “A Seawall,” where every single stutter that forms the track’s rhythmic backbone is so expertly panned, you can feel them coming from different spots inside your head.
NO CITY COULD SOUND never stops zigzagging between the human and the inhuman, melancholy and contentment, trappings from the past and promises from the future. It’s a dizzyingly technical display from a young producer who has begun to wear his heart on his sleeve, to beautiful results. Find it on Bandcamp.
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