Review - Sublamp - In Our Hiding Voice

Sublamp is the experimental/ambient solo project of Los Angeles based multimedia artist Ryan Connor. With a run of well received previous works on labels such as SEM, Dragon's Eye, Friendly Virus and Serac, Connor's latest release comes via Hibernate Recordings. Having been raised by scientist parents, Connor spent his youth living in a number of places including various US national parks and the artist credits this experience with providing an interest in textures, of growth and decay. It is perhaps with this in mind that Connor works with a sound which has a quite electronic sounding tone, yet remains organic and evolving.

The timbre of the sounds within In Our Hiding Voice are relatively unusual and what may well be mistaken as analogue synthesizers or computer algorithms are in fact several hours of electric guitar recordings painstakingly melded into a collage of sound. Nurturing the elements which musicians often avoid, such as hiss, static and feedback hum, Connor even employs a reel-to-reel tape recorder with a deliberately damaged record head, for the purpose of creating his beautifully marred audio. The effort and time expended by Connor is not in vain and one is made aware of both the remarkable density within the ten tracks which comprise this album and also of their originality.

Opening with the dark and immersive Understairs, the album then descends into a dystopian world marked by dirges and clashes of distorted sound. The tracks are quite short and so pass quickly and noisily, with hints of melody beneath the surface occasionally coming to the fore. Though In Our Hiding Voices is perhaps a more challenging listen than much of the music released on Hibernate recently, it is all the more rewarding for it.

Released February 2011, TBA, In Our Hiding Voice was mastered by Jannick Schou and comes in a run of 200 CD's, packaged in digipak, the first 50 copies sold include a bonus 3"CDr. A digital download will also be available.

Review by Adam Williams for Futuresequence