I’ve swum in a vat of honey, and spent a night in the bell of a crocus. I’ve worked the sugar mines, and helped dam rivers of burgundy. I’ve floated around the world on a cloud, and dreamed straight through solid years. And I’m here to tell you that I’ve done all these things courtesy of Triple Shadow and Compass.
Obviously then, this is music that drives the imagination, that fosters fancy. This is what would have been called mood music a few dozen years ago—before the term ambient came into vogue. Not that the two are interchangeable. For all the similarities in technique, there is a crucial difference separating them. The aim of ambient music (at least in the original Eno-esque sense of the term) is to create a sonically neutral environment that will take the edge off of a difficult or otherwise unappealing physical space—a space like an airport or an office. But the aim of mood music is to create a very specialized aural environment, to essentially obliterate the space in which it’s played by overlaying a heavy sheet of something else entirely. If ambient music is wallpaper, mood music (especially as it’s practiced by Triple Shadow and Compass) is a wild romantic landscape painting—the kind that you stare at at 3am with wonder and longing. It’s not a means of making where you are bearable, it’s a means of getting the hell out.
The ways in which Triple Shadow and Compass achieve their effect is fairly simple—albeit fundamentally mysterious. The tempos are slow—ranging from “A Brief Travelogue,” which has the drive of a steady rain, to “So it Goes,” which flutters like a strip of cloth caught on a barbwire fence on a clear summer’s day. The harmonies are dense. All four tracks feature a kind of triple canopy of arpeggios, drones consonant and dissonant, and melodic figures that sometimes (as in “Excess of Sorrow Laughs”) gleam like a sunset through the trees, or (as in “Marsh or Bird’s Eye”) rustle like half-seen creatures in the underbrush. The mystery resides in how these guys manage to refashion these basic components into four strikingly distinct musical panoramas. While all four might occupy the same piece of stylistic ground, they are as different as the four views that any single spot offers in the directions of the cardinal points.
Dave Keifer
