I’ve been enjoying the musical union of Zachary (Magpie) Corsa and Denny Wilkerson Corsa since they first surfaced as Lost Trail during the height of the DIY tape label golden age that blossomed around 2010, but the couple’s vision unexpectedly ascended to a even higher plane when they moved to Memphis, TN and reinvented themselves as Nonconnah. Since then, their run of releases has been quite incredible, as I’ve been properly blown away by at least one Nonconnah album every year since 2021. This latest one (their first for the recently resurrected Absolutely Kosher label) happily keeps most of the familiar Nonconnah themes intact (plenty of guests, complexly layered shoegaze-inspired soundscapes, an “anything goes” approach to weaving together disparate passages and motifs, meaningful use of spoken word samples, etc.), but it is also marks a significant departure in other ways. Given that, it took me a bit longer to warm to this one than previous instant classics like Don't Go Down To Lonesome Holler & Songs For And About Ghosts, but I got there eventually and now find this album to be one of the more fascinating releases in the couple’s lengthy discography.
The album fittingly opens with a child cheerfully recounting an angelic visitation in which they were informed that their entire whole family is going to heaven very soon, which cues up a characteristically roiling sea of guitar noise and twinkling synths. That is, of course, textbook Nonconnah territory and few artists can match their skill at crafting texturally rich “wall of sound” dronefests of celestial bliss. Unsurprisingly, such churning oceans of guitar noise nirvana (along with twinkling synths) are the most prominent recurring theme throughout Nonconnah vs. the Spring of Deception, but the album has an unusual structure in which the “songs” are somewhat brief and tend to cycle through multiple motifs within just a three- or four-minute span. That approach is most prominent in “We Were Free Here Once But No Longer,” as it ecstatically opens with a rush of overlapping melodies spiraling endlessly heavenward in a swirl of whooshing and warping psychedelia before the bottom drops out to reveal a surreal interlude of detuned mindfuckery and classical guitar runs before dissolving into a blearily hallucinatory outro of warbling distressed tape dreaminess.
My initial reaction to this album was admittedly “the seams are showing a bit more than usual here,” but I have since decided that the overall impression is much more akin to channel surfing through The Rapture (or at least scrolling through The Rapture on one’s phone): just a delirious, dizzying, and endlessly shifting flood of intense and ephemeral impressions. Which I suppose is what life can be like too if you experience it as a spectator rather than a participant, though Nonconnah have dramatically enhanced that experience by removing all of the bad bits. To paraphrase the title of the opening piece, the Corsas have successfully escaped Doomscroll Valley and are now valiantly trying to lead others towards the light of a natural world full of beauty, wonder, and meaningful human connections. As the written passages in the album insert reveal, the Corsas are very aware of the darkness of our times, but one woefully under-embraced alternative to watching helplessly as the world bloodily unravels is to devote oneself to creating something beautiful (or even transcendent) instead. I suppose Nonconnah have always been a beacon of light for fans of killer drone music, but that impulse is definitely more universal and explicit here than it is when they make albums about deadly Victorian wallpaper. To give an analogous (if hyperbolic) historical precedent, there were plenty of amazing saxophonists tearing it up on the jazz scene in the tumultuous 1960s, but John Coltrane was the one who met the moment and recorded A Love Supreme.
Given that this is the sort of album in which almost every song regularly experiences at least one complete transformation, The Spring of Deceit is best experienced as an immersive whole via headphones, as one of the most delightful features of any Nonconnah album is experiencing the rich details lurking in their roaring and panoramic soundscapes (crackle, hiss, field recordings, gnarly guitar noise, inventively misused tape loops). If I had to pick a single piece that represents the duo at their finest, however, it would be “You’re Too Old To Be Killing Rabbits, Beatrice,” which sounds like it could be a black box recording of the final moments of a plane that accidentally flew through a rain of falling stars into a glorious psychedelic organ mass in heaven. That said, “When They Opened Their Mouths They Sounded Like Shrieking Birds” is also a bit of a mindbomb, as there is a great sample lurking at the heart of a tender string elegy in which a woman’s voice announces that she a dweller from a higher spiritual world trying to bring light to the world, but is finding that not a lot of people are receptive to that message. While it is entirely possible that I am misreading the fragments that I could catch, the sentiment struck me as remarkably relevant to understanding the Nonconnah aesthetic: the noise (distortion, hiss, crackle) has overwhelmed the signal (beauty), but the signal is definitely still there for the seekers who want to find it. Also, the noise in Nonconnah’s world is a hell of a lot more life-affirming than the noise in the actual world. I suspect new listeners will be struck more profoundly by this album than longtime fans, as I would probably find this album absolutely revelatory if my impressions were not numbed by familiarity, but this is yet another great album from the Corsas and one hell of a vision as well.
