Pimmon's Paul Gough has made a career out of constructing dense and complex ambient soundscapes. On this, his first full-length in five years, he shows no signs of rust and delivers a headphone album of striking depth and vibrancy.
Preservation
I recently learned that Paul Gough began making experimental music in 1982 after being inspired by fellow Aussie Tom Ellard's criminally underappreciated Severed Heads, which immediately gave me a favorable disposition towards him. Not that he needs that, of course, as he seems to have been doing quite well before acquiring my goodwill. Unusually, however, he has only been releasing his computer-based abstract experimentations for the last decade (aside from very limited self-released cassettes) and has a reputation for being somewhat reclusive, though he has collaborated with some well-known folks like Christian Fennesz and enjoys a healthy degree of international renown. I have also read that Gough hates bios, so I guess I will elaborate no further (in case he reads this). I don't want trouble.
"Come On Join The Choir Invisible" commences the proceedings with a ghostly mass choral drone, which is quite striking but regrettably fails to evolve into much of anything. I will give Gough the benefit of the doubt here and assume that it is meant only as an introduction rather than a complete work, as the following track ("Evil Household Ceremony") is much more ambitious and fully realized. Its foundations are somewhat mundane (a pulsing, wavering drone and a buried repeating melodic loop), but a chaotic blizzard of electronic blurts and whizzes rages all around it and Gough's singular production abilities make for a very engaging headphone experience.
Notably, those first two tracks illustrate an odd paradox: Gough's studio wizardry often transforms even somewhat pedestrian material into something alive and attention-grabbing, yet he occasionally fails to exploit his more inspired moments to their full potential. That said, Gough gets absolutely everything right with the haunting and near-perfect "It Will Never Snow In Sydney", which is very similar in tone to Angelo Badalamenti's more unsettling soundtrack work for David Lynch (but far more complex). Menacing low-end synths combine with heavily reverbed and echoed voice snippets, thick drones, and mangled swells to create an atmosphere of singularly haunting disquietude. Then an unexpected psychedelic menagerie of shifting digital frogs (or something) drifts into the mix and it stops being near-perfect and enters the realm of flat-out amazing.
Pimmon nails it again with crackling and roaring slow-motion melancholy of "Hidden," but "Sydney" largely eclipses all the surrounding tracks and causes them to seem pale and somewhat anticlimactic by comparison. That is not to say they are not enjoyable- it's just that Gough never again achieves such a brilliant convergence of studio mastery and songcraft. Smudge Another Yesterday is a vibrant, complexly layered work that is quite gratifying even during its least impressive moments when listened to attentively. Gough is a staggeringly skilled and meticulous producer that achieves improbable clarity amidst elephantine density and elevates panning into an art form, so it is probably unreasonable to expect his musical vision to consistently reach similar heights. This is the work of an extremely purposeful and patient man at the peak of (most of) his powers.
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