Dark Ambient Review: Ghosts on Broken Pavement
Review by Casey Douglass
I really like urban
spaces. I like rural ones too, but being in a city feels so different
to somewhere more natural. The traffic noise and fumes, the heat
rising from the bricks, sometimes even the people, it all seems quite
nice. Mount Shrine’s Ghosts on Broken Pavement brings the
listener to a different kind of urban soundscape, but one no less
interesting or intricate.
Album
Description: The radio transmissions led you here, a city of
memories past and passed. The streets lie silent as you watch from
above the high rise. A twirling mountain casts a deafening shadow
over this place. Here between the world of life and death you are but
a tiny spec of dust on the shoulder of giants, a world built by the
dreamers that came before you. The sleepers drift here, trapped in
glitching time loops that crackle when reset.
When I was listening to
Ghosts on Broken Pavement, I realised that, for me at least,
each track seemed like a slow stroll, one taking me from the more
urban areas and out into the fringes nearer nature at the end. The track
titles seem to fit this notion, beginning with the likes of
Gray-Tinged Suburbs and Underpass, before ending up at Outsider
Station and Empty Slopes.
What many of the tracks
share is a smooth and lulling aesthetic, tiny crackles and mellow
static mingling with field-recordings of wind, rain, and other
real-world sounds. On a number of tracks I thought I could hear a car
passing by, but gently, as if its wheels were driving on a
marshmallow road, its engine wrapped in cushioning foam. Underpass
was a track that I felt was particularly vivid in its urban setting,
the sounds conjuring the vision of an underpass at sunset. The road
is quiet, the light golden, and the odd car that does pass casts
watery lightning flashes along the walls as the sunlight hits its
curves. I found it very peaceful.
Another track that
resonated with me was Held Breeze, which, as you might imagine,
features the wind. For me, it was a track that was about the
momentary “caging” of nature, the wind that you can hear on this
track is roaming and thrashing around an ornate courtyard,
the kind where everything is far too tidied and tended. You know the
sort, they usually sit in wealthier areas and have little cages
around the bottoms of the trees. The mixture of the roaming hiss and
other notes makes this a layered track, full of gentle movement and
peace.
Outsider Station, the
penultimate track, also became one of my favourites. It led me to
think of an industrial train station, rather than the passenger kind,
the trains coming and going without a human in sight. A metallic
tapping rhythm features quite prominently here, a sound that I later
came to think was probably the signal chimes you often hear at train
crossings. This, mixed with what could be the sound of squeaking and
knocking machinery, and the way the track goes a bit fuzzier in the
second half, certainly lends itself to an intriguing “non-quiet”
place, that seems quiet anyway. If that makes sense.
Ghosts on Broken
Pavement, for me, was a journey from the emission-filled air and
right-angles of the city, to the mantle of nature at its fringes, the
quiet rumblings of humanity sounding softer the further I mentally
roamed. Whether it’s the oil slicked streets and brake-squeal
ghosts of the first track, or the occasional passing car and gentle
tones of the last, the album takes you through bubbles of fuzzy
comfort and leaves you safely at journey’s end. It’s another fine
dark ambient album and one well worth chilling out to when you want
something less harsh from your music listening.
You can visit Ghosts
on Broken Pavement on Bandcamp here, and you can also listen to
Underpass below:
I was given a review copy of this album.
Album Title:
Ghosts on Broken Pavement
Album Artist:
Mount Shrine
Label: Cryo
Chamber
Released: Jan
29, 2019
