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Music

Delve Deep into Ambient Legend Loscil's "Drained Lake"

If you like ballet dancers and getting caught in the rain, this one's for you.

As Loscil, Vancouver resident Scott Morgan makes the kind of ambient music that hovers perfectly between soothing and disquiet: processed soundscapes that bring blackened lunar landscapes to mind. This is ambient that hisses and crackles, clanks and echoes. Next month sees Morgan release his eighth album on esteemed Chicago label Kranky. Monument Builders is another sterling entry in the back catalogue of a producer devoted to a deep and total exploration of atmospheric conditions.

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The lead track from the record is the slow and stately "Drained," a near seven minute waltz through frozen-lake piano and spectral drift. The accompanying video, which we're premiering today, is a suitably dislocating experience.

"The dancer in the video, Vanessa Goodman, has been a frequent collaborator of mine here in Vancouver for the past couple years," Morgan told us. "We have a really great working relationship and the video started as me approaching her with the music and asking her to choreograph something that I could shoot. I originally wanted it to be purely in black and white and look really photographic. I was heavily influenced by a Norman McLaren ballet film from the 60's called Pas de Deux."

Morgan went on to add that, "I shot the dance in a black box theatre with multiple lenses including a cheap tilt-shift lens called the lens-baby which ended up adding this ghostly feel. Because Vanessa's takes were slightly different each time, the two layers combined nicely to appear like she was dancing with her own ghost. At the same time I was creating all this hand-inked and scratched 16mm film that I had scanned and converted to digital. I use a lot of this texture in my live visuals these days. I blended this with the dance video and I really liked how it looked. It created a super dense, murky, mysterious feel that worked well with the sentiment of the music."

The result is nothing short of spectacular.

Loscil's Monument Builders arrives on Kranky on November 11th.