Andrew Stephens has delivered us another intensely gritty ambient piece, his second under the name Scattered Lodges.
“The Alpine Chorus” is a single available as a digital download released at the beginning of July. Like its predecessor, the six-track Asymmetric Soup EP, this new work strikes a fascinating balance between rough and relaxing.
The grit delivers more than just texture. It gives Stephens’ work a quiet kind of aggressiveness that will demand your attention. The work has a gravitas that a lot of ambient artists fail to capture.
This isn’t to suggest that the material is difficult to listen to, or even dark. These two releases will have the same positive effect on you that great ambient music does. It just happens to come with a lot of the sounds you may be more accustomed to hearing in more challenging noise pieces.
Stephens’ website describes the music this way: “Silky synth pads, tasteful atmospheric drones, glitches and found sound coexist in a musical, but musique concrète, fashion.”
Before this year, Stephens was known primarily as a founding member of ills, an experimental hip hop duo. He says he thinks of this new project in visual art terms. This video for “Come On, Annihilate” from Asymmetric Soup demonstrates that clearly.