Discovering new music is always thrilling. Irrespective if you’re lucky to have access to a promo due out in 3 months’ time, or tuning into something released 50 years ago, for the first time – sounds which are new to your ear and brain – are new.
At the turn of the year, I was fortunate enough to have a break and whilst the weather was bad, it made perfect sense to have an unhurried explore. An ongoing Roland Kayn trawl through YouTube led me to a fascinating series on cybernetics by Chris Miller, who I eventually realised was the person behind Émile Zener. This reminded me to revisit his superb composition Contraluz and before long, I was stunned all over again.
Re-energised, I headed to the label – Critique of Everyday Life’s Bandcamp page, and quickly discovered the label’s first release – William Selman’s The Life Of Lines.
I’d spent time last year with Selman’s most recent release, The Light Moves Between, a beautiful, if understated album, but the Portland, Oregon based artist has, since then, been someone’s work I’d meant to explore further…
Therefore, it made sense to start that exploration here.
The Life Of Lines was released back in 2020, but our 5 years of ignorance, quickly transformed into solid moments of awe. A single piece, lasting a shade over an hour, loosely constructed around an illusionary central drone that is actually a dazzling drift into the very fabric of sound.
The piece is assembled from sounds collected over several years – vibraphone, Japanese vending machines, windy forests, organ, chemical reactions, melting lakes, insects attracted to meat-covered microphones, and then presumably all knitted together through a Serge synthesizer.
The range of sounds treated like a contradiction pulled from Eno’s Oblique Strategies – gently teasing out the differences, whilst concurrently making everything as similar as possible. The listener aboard a pendulum that ducks and dives in a stream of evolving sound. Everything feels like its capably endless, but nothing remains static for long.
A rising wave, an alarm bell, a temple bell, a landscape at dawn, a rising ball of energy expanding into some odd strummed, almost groove encases you within the first 90 seconds. Dial tones, water, the buzz of cables and insects, the thawing of ice. Completely magnetised by the sounds, even the chunk of silence around 35 minutes in, feels as thick and heady as everything around it. The globular mass that then grows out of this, like a swamp birthing a planet.
Eventually the whole thing leads to music and a state of mind that would only be possible to reach having zoned out to the preceding 40 or so minutes.
Over time and numerous plays, The Life Of Lines regenerates itself into hundreds of little stepping stones in sound, everything serving as a bridge between what came before and what happens next. An album full of episodes that could easily last the duration all on their own. Twists and turns all sanded, glued and piled together into a journey between two points in space, driving forward with a wave of shifting ceaseless creativity.
This is a recording, rewarded by loud playbacks, careful listening and in numerous settings. Actively filling entire chunks of my home late at night and mingling and weaving with the crows and frozen ground crunching under my feet on a sub-zero wander. This entire form enmeshing and connecting, stretching into spaces and places the sounds have never encountered before.
The bells, and what we assume might be the vibraphone, eventually performing a joyous twinkling outline of a fanfare near the end, to signal it’s time to return to your normality.
We’d place The Life Of Lines in great company – reminding us of all time favourites like Jim O’Rourke’s Terminal Pharmacy or Andrew Oda’s Sotto/Spirit. Whilst conceptually different, the common ground here is an endless transformation that zones in on the magic of juxtaposing somehow innocuous sounds, that combine and transform into the actual opposite.
Ambient, but with gravity.
A drone but always moving.
A gateway from normal into aural illusions, micro and macro world building, easy to follow, yet brimming with oddness – the purest possible distillation of psychedelia.
We might be late wrapping our mind around The Life Of Lines but as the first major listen to make our brain significantly tingle, it’s been a spectacular opening soundtrack to 2025.
The Life Of Lines is available as a digital download on Critique of Everyday Life
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