- It’s easy to understand right now why the Melbourne-based Henry Reese might be nostalgic for his 2019 trip through tropical North Queensland. He celebrates it with his ambient Lite Fails project and its second record, North Of Capricorn.
In so doing he aims for a different understanding of the vast and distant area it depicts than what’s often espoused down south. Not living down that way I can only guess that the stereotypical view is of a place that’s bogan, backwards and empty. It’s probably further embellished by fevered imaginings thanks to Australia’s catalogue of b-grade, outback horror films, from Razorback to Wolf Creek. North Of Capricorn couldn’t be further from that.
It’s still exotic, sure, courtesy of its field recordings of lapping tide pools and restless bat colonies if nothing else, but the music that is piled on top of that is, well, light and often joyous. Opener, Coral Pools, features those little waves on top of which Reese constructs a swirling, particulate rush of synth sound that could as easily be the pixelated re-imagining of the ocean, or perhaps the sound of a train gobbling up the long tracks between northern settlements, or even some kind of happily malfunctioning merry-go-round.
I recall motifs like this from The End Of The World Has Already Happened, the first Lite Fails record of 2020. It’s interesting to find similarities, because, conceptually, they’re quite different. The End Of The World recontextualised old Australian archival recordings with an ambient imagination that was weighed down by the knowledge that, contemporarily, large parts of the country were burning to the ground. North Of Capricorn, by contrast, takes much more recent sounds, captured by Reese himself, which are full of life and the noise of nature. I’m sure you could make lots of intellectual arguments for the connections between the two: new green shoots rising out of the ashes, for instance. For Henry Reese himself, I imagine it as an attempt to find respite in his musical world as much as anything else. The charred remains of so much of Australia haven’t even cooled before the next fire season is upon us, that’s if anyone’s even noticed, all locked-down, full of worry and fed up with the pandemic which has pushed burning -for the moment at least- to the back of our minds.
The metaphor of new life is very easy to hear on Seek Shade: warm, distorted, fiery synthesisers fade out, replaced by raucous bats matched, amusingly, with an orchestra tuning, giving me, at least, the image of penguin suited musicians hanging upside down off mango trees and feasting (how else does a muso stay alive right now?). Fruit Doves features more crystalline synth-work accompanying the warbling birds of the title, the sound is -a bit Vangelis?- seductive but cooler than what we’ve heard so far. The twelve minute runtime of For Hiroshi takes the twirl of the merry-go-round and shrinks it into a clockwork music box, or perhaps it’s a Chopin Etude recreated out of synths, spun sugar and scintillating light; oh and, of course, the chirping of birds. Our final destination North Of Capricorn turns out to be a long way off indeed: the title Rille typically refers to channels in the surface of the moon. This helps to make sense of the gently twisting, icy expanse that rolls out across twenty-six minutes. It’s interesting that Reese would choose a place where no field recordings are possible and no life exists as his final gesture, but that doesn’t make it any less full of a sense of cool, sparkling wonder and, finally, despite this, in some magical act of teleportation the sound dissolves into the bubbling of running water, ornamented with the occasional bird call.
Given the harsh realities of the present and despite this record’s field recordings, this comforting soundtrack may not depict a place that really exists in the physical world, North Of Capricorn or anywhere else. At a time like this, however, you seek solace where you can find it. Lite Fails delights in the fabled irrepressibility of nature and gentle music that sparkles and shimmers. Whatever else this year takes, we still have the hope that life may find a way and we still have music.
- Chris Cobcroft.