Here it is, “The Fly Circles The Drain As If It Were An Orchid Blooming”, Fog's new album, about which the artist from Wilmington, Delaware himself expressed himself as follows a few months ago: “The album is focused on death and on the process of understanding it. What does it mean to die or kill. In these confusing times, life is not taken for granted, but it seems death is. Right now, thousands of people are dying in Gaza and of course I feel guilty about that. At the end of the day, though, I'm just one person and there's nothing I can do, no charity I can donate to, or no protest I can attend to directly end this suffering. And this suffering does not only concern Gaza: just think of what is happening in Myanmar with the Rohingya, or the genocide of the Uighur people at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. This new album of mine is an investigation into the futility of death and the dying process, and I hope the sound reflects this. It will definitely be a new direction for me.”
A few months after our interview, we discover that it was above all his mother's illness that renewed that atavistic fear in Fog, so much so as to push him, musically speaking, towards a “new direction”, so new that Fog revealed, during a private conversation, that “The Fly Circles The Drain As If It Were An Orchid Blooming” is the last album of this project of his, a choice also dictated by the desire to make a point with what he himself defined as his “ more honest work.”
We take note of this and immerse ourselves in this new, mammoth adventure, in which the influence of Paul Dolden remains firmly in the background in several songs (“some would define them as fear-inducing”, Fog specified, referring first of all to the first single of the album , “May 30, 1431, Rouen, France”), just as the work of stratification of the sound sources remains solid and painstaking, created using the faithful Audacity.
As in the previous and splendid “Thirty Three, Recurring”, also in these grooves the music pulsates, vibrates and expands within mental spaces, playing on the contrast of repetitiveness and accumulation. The overall yield, as in the case of the initial title track (in which the electronics seem to reproduce the hypnotic buzz of a fly, while the strings float in the void and everything unfolds like a soundtrack of uncertainty), is that of a panorama with existential hues. Fog also draws from the Chicago school of the AACM to move on an abstract electro-cosmic palette (“Tumors”, “You'll Hang for This”), or to prepare the ground for a disorienting jam for polyrhythms, vocal loops and synth bubbles (“The Process of Letting Go”), until arriving, in some cases, at deeply destabilizing chamber music (“End-Stage Liver Disease”).
His is also an art of perspective deformation, in which the psychic flow is bent to become shapeless ecstasy (“It Doesn't Feel Good Anymore” and the first part of “Sodium Pentobarbital”). “Asbestosis” is another excursion into the unknown, this time however driven by a breathing piston and, therefore, by hysterically martial drums. In “Ab Aeterno”, however, a choral full of melancholy is on stage.
At the center of the work stands the twenty-three minutes of “Threnody For Hernán Cortés”, opened by a violent conflagration free-improv for horribly filtered sax, synth gurgling, dull pulsations and violent brushstrokes, only to be orchestrated like a symphony in which post-industrial and contemporary music go hand in hand, moving further and further into mists of nightmares.
Evocative and incredibly rich in detail, enigmatic and stimulating, “The Fly Circles The Drain As If It Were An Orchid Blooming” is destined to remain, like all Fog's works, a matter for very few intimates.
04/11/2024
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
