Steve Nolan’s double cassette set of ambient dream music opens up portals, reroutes neural pathways and unlocks associative trains of thought

Steve Nolan has birthed two cassette albums as one. From Water and Ream are as game pods from David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, one healthy and the other diseased, each sustaining its own survival through a symbiotic connection with the other. It’s an intense set that reroutes neural pathways and unlocks associative trains of thought. Nolan’s ambient soundscapes have film hardwired into their DNA, with his drones, synths and piano consistently feeding emotions and implying narratives.

From Water opens with “The Choice”, a prologue to dystopia. It’s the extinction event about to happen. Think the early chapters of Stephen King’s The Stand or the subdued panic of Robert Wise’s film of The Andromeda Strain. Warning klaxons emerge from the background, but achieve little by way of actual warning. “Sunday Sherman” is the ghost inside the machine of a deadly techno thriller, a title sequence to literally die for. Prepare to be disarmed by “A True Story”, as an American Second World War veteran recounts a harrowing chapter from the conflict, the mental and spiritual toll that it took on him, and the permanence of love. I’m reminded of the scene in David Lynch’s The Straight Story where Alvin Straight and another veteran share a moment about their war experiences, the recollections becoming mental reenactments that disrupt the present. Only three tracks in and the listener can barely come up for air.

Elsewhere, “Horse” feels like a slow emergence from early morning dreams, truths almost grasped. A piano line drifts out of rooms inside the mind, doors flung open to let the synthscapes in. “Sink” gently overwhelms, tears flowing through a smile too genuine to be contained. It’s a beatific Laura Palmer with the angel as the credits roll on Fire Walk With Me or Diane as Betty after the dream has fully unravelled at the conclusion of Mulholland Drive. That Nolan can get anywhere close to the abstract emotive power of Angelo Badalamenti is a powerful recommendation in itself.

The cover of Ream looks like a found object that was rusted underneath the oceans of From Water, which is a telling analogue. Encountering this second cassette is like entering another room. The ebb and flow of life is at once replaced by the industrial dirge of “Tip”, stalking the smoke-stacked back yards of a city in turmoil. What knowledge had been gained through the course of From Water has now been unlearned. Although that’s not quite true, as Ream doesn’t so much follow From Water as occur in tandem with it. Two worlds side by side, feeding one another. Sonic shifts take on talismanic significance and certain tracks become portals allowing one to cross between the two places. It’s the machine in The Leftovers made manifest in music. The enigmatic yet fully realised sound design work of Dean Hurley haunts “The Ghost” which Nolan pursues with intuitive discipline, amplifying room tones to become audible palimpsests. There’s an under-conscious propulsion to its steady drone.  

“Reamer” has an apparent openness about it, yet is but an invitation to the intangible. Welcome to the spaces between, unstable and beckoning. Not content with the finest title of this double set, “There’s Goats Now” pile-drives arcane technology into post-techno reconditioning. The analogue bubble bath and post-death communication of “Identification” doesn’t so much close proceedings as provide a gateway back across to From Water. It might be painful – discombobulating at the very least – but the machine has been meticulously programmed for consciousness transportation. Ream feels as if it has been conceived through an unholy amalgamation of alchemy and future tech. That it bleeds and bruises for From Water’s relative beauty and calm makes both cassettes all the more alive.

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Stewart Gardiner
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