Review: Beyond The Vastness Of Infinity by The Owl

"Don't judge the sound. There are no, as it were, proper sounds or improper sounds, it's all just sound. Just listen to the sound - the words of Alan Watts from his speech that opens up this daunting and ambitious new record from The Owl. The highly prolific musician is always one for creating unique free-flowing sonic landscapes that seem to bend and twist into different shapes depending on the particularly direction The Owl is looking to do down. Beyond The Vastness Of Infinity is the 55th release by The Owl, a project only started in the last couple of years, and is the third release in the 'Vastness' series of records. It's a daunting title to read before we even get in to the music, and it does lead me to immediately wonder: with such constant productivity, is The Owl able to really make good on the title's exponential ambition?

Like many of the The Owl's records, Beyond The Vastness Of Infinity is designed to overwhelm the senses with a touch of comic absurdity amongst the severity. While this isn't totally noise music in the strictest terms, it's composition appears to have as much in common with the creators of noise music as it does with the those who conceive the kind of riffs which, underneath the veil of harshness, this album is built around. There are melodies, there are hooks and there are rhythms, but it all feels quite abstracted from any type of music which these constituent parts would normally form.

The opening track Paracosmic Expansion begins with an ambient backing to that Alan Watts speech, which offers a lesson in mediation and it's relationship to sound. It's a wonderful way to open the record, but it acts as much as a warning for what to expect as it does an introduction. It's blissful to begin with, but soon the trepidation of such an immense sonic journey starts to take hold as the dark bass and guitar lines take prominence. As Watts continues with his lecture, the music reaches clipping point, though this is very much deliberate and, as the record goes on, is used even more as a sonic tool.

As we head into the second track Luminous Stellar Explosions, things open up into a flurry of static and distortion that feels like an enveloping blanket of cosmic radiation made into soundwaves. The track peaks and troughs in a remarkably dynamic way, the shifts from the softer moments into the loud and heavy ones is brutally intense. Everything is attacking your ears so much that it seems to lose itself slightly, and the natural compression of such a ridiculous amount of sound hitting a recording all at once does limit it's impact to begin with. The Owl gets rid of this by simply turning the volume up as the track goes on, before slamming it all in our face and dropping into a cacophonous section of doomy bass and echoing space noise.

We continue on into Transcending New Heights, which moves us out of the abstract hooks for a while and focusses on the drones and noise. The sounds are already familiar from the previous tracks, but here they are left to stew in their own juices a bit more rather than acting as the colouring for a riff. It's haunting and yet, despite it's meditative aura, also feels quite striking. Eventually it all fades and we begin Hymn for Laniakea with a very soft, almost inaudible bass line. As it picks up the distortion that hits is epic and the levels of sub bass are almost destructive and quite uncomfortable. Gradually the whole thing begins to swirl and shudder under it's own weight, sounding the like the interior of an imploding star. There is a moment of brief relief as we return to the quieter sound, but soon enough things kick in again with full force. The broken harmonics are torn apart by the rampant fuzz as layers of glacial treble find their way in amongst the powerful bass before everything slowly fades back into nothingness.

The finale is Pōwehi, which begins with an industrial rhythmic bass sat behind a cloud of deep cosmic noise to set the tone. It's another track without a tangible melody, but rather than a slowly developing drone it consists of a cataclysmic blend of noise which builds in volume to the point of aural revulsion. Having been blasted with a earful of turbulence it seems like the track is over, but a final minimal flourish of icy tones comes into frame to see us on our way. It is the end of this journey, but it feels like there are any more to be had.

The thing I enjoyed most about Beyond The Vastness Of Infinity is The Owl's ability to create so many levels of music using such similar sounds and tones throughout the record. The Owl has found and explored every fathomable noise that can be reached in this specific sound, and it makes for a totally enchanting album. There are times when the layers are so conglomerated into each other that the sound is completely overwhelming and almost tortuous, but this is without doubt something conceived in the design of this album. Once again The Owl has produced a quite sublime record that goes far beyond the reaches of the doom and drone metal from which it originates. Does it live up to the ambition of the title? Damn right it does!  

Beyond The Vastness Of Infinity is released July 2nd and will be available on The Owl's Bandcamp page. 

Ready my extensive interview with The Owl: Part One and Part Two