Review Summary: An immersive work of superlative art, true to nature and yourself. Enjoy with a hot drink.
Memories in gray…at ten, or nine, or eleven years old I clocked a shark in the snoot…but was it a shark at all looking up at me or some big long snaggletooth fish with slimy mouth agape and wide searching eyes, was it trying to communicate with me, desperate vestiges of pained animal longing bespeaking ancient disconnects between killer of land and victim of sea, and what on Earth possessed the thing not to bite? A memory exists not in color. Pulsing, kid limbs flaying, propelling this child’s body from shoulder-deep water onto gritty sand. The story one tells herself.
This is
Gray by Submersion, an ambient/dub-techno artist so lamentably under the radar you may just punch yourself for having never before submitted to his swirling meditative soundscapes. The record is easy to get lost in and follows an intuitive structure: brief, chilly field recordings – aperture to railyard, to wetland, to waterfall, and to nature reserve – give way to sprawling triptychs, four of them. They will make you think, they will return lost memories to you, and though the intent is gentle you will cower at the recognition that these distant recollections, or reconstructions, were never yours to begin with. You are the ghost that haunts your own experience. You are shark, fist, flight, salt, scream, safety…you are the telling, in each iteration, of every public or private anecdote you’ve lingered upon. And, in the end, you are the night obscuring the veracity of what really happened. This is
Gray by Submersion.
One hour of patient, deliberately isolating compositions buttressed by the found sounds of a world not crumbling exactly, only catching up to you. It feels good. Are you are wearing headphones for this one? You should be. Beats skitter into being after long stretches of build-up. Phasing synths oscillate this way and that. I struggle for the right words. The shark is dead now, surely. And you?
