Triangulate the aesthetics of Grouper, Skullcrusher, and Maria B.C., and you get something like the breathtaking new album “The Gathering” from the Taiwanese artist Moon Void. The result is a decollage of ambient sound and left field pop. There is something here for fans of shoegaze and dreampop, too, but listeners will need to slow down, wading into the reverb and abstraction of these eight soundscapes. For those who do, you will be rewarded with an ethereal record built for all seasons.
Mixing in a backdrop of crickets and birdsong early on, Moon Void uses these elements from the natural world to ground some of the more otherworldly synth notes, vocals, and piano. According to the artist, this is “a collection of sounds completed a year ago, and held closely until this very moment. The album is about everything and nothing simultaneously.” And–very much in this spirit–the collection somehow manages to incorporate the mundane rhythms of everyday life while simultaneously feeling epic in scope.
The first track, “Amber Psalm,” gradually layers in many of these musical tropes, including synth pads, reverb-drenched vocals, and faint distortion, effectively setting the tone for the album. The title appears to evoke the psalms of David, but here, the artist seems more invested in a landscape imbued with the sacred than any Judeo-Christian theological tradition. Once the psalm dissolves, the track “Good Night River Green” opens with a sparse acoustic guitar strummed gently against what sounds like an evening spent in the woods. The vocals are reminiscent of singers like Jen Champion from Carissa’s Weird. Initially, only the insects accompany the singer in this stripped-down composition, but the production becomes much more lush later on, and the narrator paints an image of the beach: “I’ve been washed by the ocean/ All the things I braid/ Burning in the sand.” The ocean, then, offers a familiar site of baptism and cleansing–connecting the landscape to spiritual practice, meaning making, and perhaps even a certain degree of self-mythologizing.
“Sunless Forest Home” moves away from the folk contours of an acoustic guitar, taking the listener back into a more distorted and less organic soundscape of electronica and ambient noise. This introspective composition explores the limits of interiority and time. The narrator sings, “Look inside your body/ Now it’s blooming/ Into the void.” This darkness, however, is seasonal, as the following track reminds us, “Days getting by and seasons change/ Though I tried to be here.” More Ecclesiastes than Psalms, these songs account for the passage of time and the difficulties of being present in an ever-changing world.
The titular track opens with a lush wave of sound that moves through chords like an incoming tide. This final song is a fitting end to an album that is shot through with the sacred. The human voice recedes, audible in the background but without legible meaning or discernible language. “The Gathering” is the end of the record, but in some respects, it feels like the End. It is a song that is daunting, calling to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept of the sublime. To the Romantic writer of a previous century, the sublime represented something that was grandiose and overwhelming, invoking religious feeling, sure, but perhaps more importantly, a smallness in the observer. It is a difficult feat for any piece of art to achieve, but I think this record effectively bends toward the sublime, and as an artist of any kind, what else can we ask for? In any case, you can check it out for yourself–and I strongly recommend that you do so–through the links below.
Written by SilenceKid
