A Winged Victory For The Sullen - Atomos (2014) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. Atomos I
02. Atomos II
03. Atomos III
04. Atomos V
05. Atomos VI
06. Atomos VII
07. Atomos VIII
08. Atomos IX
09. Atomos X
10. Atomos XI
11. Atomos XII


A Winged Victory for the Sullen is a collaboration between Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie and pianist Dustin O'Halloran. Their score for Wayne McGregor's ATOMOS recasts the elegant sound of their 2011 debut for McGregor's purposes, with pensive melancholy shading into physical menace.

Wayne McGregor has great taste in ambient music. I saw his piece FAR a couple years ago, and hearing Ben Frost's delicate yet concussive score, then unreleased, was as rich a part of the experience as watching the dance. McGregor has also commissioned music from the likes of Max Richter (Sum and Infra) and Ólafur Arnalds (Dyad 1909), and you can add to that list A Winged Victory for the Sullen, a collaboration between Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie and pianist Dustin O'Halloran. Their score for ATOMOS recasts the elegant sound of their 2011 debut for McGregor's purposes, with pensive melancholy shading into physical menace.

If Stars of the Lid's music sounds like a hollowed-out 100-piece ensemble with ether for its innards, AWVFTS is the opposite. Made from strings, piano, the occasional horn, and electric guitars processed into ambient washes and scrawls, it's all inner voices coiled together, more classical than drone. The music is recorded in large spaces, so that between natural acoustic and electronic effects, every instrument seems to float in an ocean-sized force field of harmonic resonance. Minimal melodic information carries maximal tone, the few voices somehow resplendently full and forlornly isolated at once.

McGregor choreographs for a leading modern company, London's Royal Ballet, and, occasionally, Thom Yorke. Rather than making his experimental work challenging and his traditional work beautiful, he makes all of his work both, building modern movement on ballet lines. This classically tempered novelty influences his musical commissions, where chamber music anchors electronic disturbances and asymmetrical structures. AWVFTS adapts, making ATOMOS louder and more mobile than its impeccably tentative predecessor—more volatile and disjointed, with basses you can feel in your body because this is for the body. The duo's signature stasis is now packed with interior movement; particles swarm through drones like dancers suspended in stage lighting.

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