All Points North (AL)
by: Alan Lockett
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A set of evocative locative transmissions from New Ambient Kid on the Detroit Block, Manitou. All Points North comes to us courtesy of fellow-Michiganians, Matt Borghi and Jason Sloan, on their Slo.Bor Media label - till now a workspace exhibiting canvases of their own ambient guitar-brushstrokes. A portrait of the artist (here) has Jack Read (aka Manitou) struck by “an overwhelming sonic epiphany” while doing environmental research for his PhD. The spirit of enquiry had taken him near Ford’s River Rouge complex in Detroit, but his most compelling data proved to be “the bleeding noise of I-75, the toxic hum of the River Rouge plant and the gurgling of the nearby filtration ponds”. His findings based on this close encounter with the shrinking of the natural sound environment were worked out not through dusty dissertation, but in dusky audio documentation, expressed through Manitou, and a form of “sonic activism” that's discreetly down with the Acoustic Ecology crew (here again).
Manitou’s unveiling comes with blurb-refs linking him to the Chicago ‘space rock’ tradition as represented by early-period Kranky (see esp. Windy & Carl and Stars Of The Lid). A quite felicitous association, what with the growing influence of this ‘school’ on recent ambient with its drone’n’space and post-shoegaze tendencies (a lineage from 4AD to MBV, to Main, to Seefeel, and beyond). Manitou’s is indeed a spacious music, albeit cloaked, enshrouded by a production that shuns hi-lo definition and up-lit articulation in favour of a murky moody middle and all lights dimmed. And All Points North is indeed awash with languorous passages that do at times remind of (early) Kranky; slow swells and surges that may sometimes seem to reach for the Stars (of the Lid), but note: the undynamic duo of McBride/Wiltzie are themselves swimmers in the slipstream of post-classical and film soundtrackery, disciples of Mahler-Górecki-Pärt, steeped in the audio-lore of Rota-Preisner-Badalamenti. That legacy is Manitou's too.
Influence acknowledged, a distinctive voice is clearly present - spectral, dream-dazed, combined in strange consonance with a nuanced urban edge, at once up close and ‘romantic’, yet remote, almost alienated, like an estranged lover. It gets played out, here in a befogged grandeur, there in a downbeat street-engaged version of backwoods bliss-out - less that of dream-pup Darla than a more ambivalent space in the vicinity of Infraction. Titles like “Abandonment Litters I-75 Through The City” and “Woodward Avenue Serenade” give clear pointers to Detroit spinnage, painting the city contours with sound, to preserve something of its environment in audio-mediated solution. The source of Manitou music’s smeared-lens sonorities is, like its sound palette, unclear; occasionally a guitar pokes through, or a shuddering old synth, but much seems based on slivers sliced from classical orchestral passages, pitch-shifted and bent till many times removed (think, for example, of what Andrew Deutsch did with scissor clips of Mahler’s 5th to create his Loops over Land).
Beyond the earlier documented influence traces, you might find “Campus Martius” taking leaves out of Boards of Canada’s doleful resonant chord progression book, withholding everything but their twirl; and the swoon-song of “Listening to Classical Music, Sipping Tea on your Veranda - Time Stood Still” falling in a similar woozy Milieu. The queasy cascades of “Watching The Hudson's Building Fall” sound like Read giving The Caretaker’s Haunted Ballroom treatment to a faded memory of an imaginary film theme. All Points North’s nineteen tracks may seem excessive, but the impression is one of a 1-hour+ suite in various movements, some fleeting, sketch-like, others more extended, the whole adding up to more than parts-sum. And when “Looking up Grand River, From Here All Points North” brings the ceremonials to a close, its resonant paean to place, rejoicing in neo-Basinskian melancholic splendour, joins with the likes of “Snowy Night Riding the Peoplemover” and “Things Are Different Now but the Street Signs Haven't Changed” in making up Manitou’s pocket-book of urban hymns. These big space-tunes hint at something beneath and beyond - epic vignettes that would stop streets seething and make masses surrender to what surrounds. (AL)
Soundclips: Manitou - All Points North - Soundclip Player
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