There’s a line in Hannah Diamond’s “Unbreakable”, the final track in her most recent LP Perfect Picture, right at the very utmost end of the album actually, where she sings:
“Sometimes good things come from an ending”
It’s not that I find myself drawn to this particular lyric often, rather that I feel I ruminate on finiteness a lot, always thinking about endings before they arrive, never quite allowing the moment to simply be. Too worried, perhaps, about what’s to come and not always being present.
I suppose I’ve been especially cognisant of this facet of my character over the last couple of weeks because my housemate has started the process of buying a house, and it’s likely that in the next two or three months my abode will change, I will be leaving the rented space I’ve called home for over seven years, and life will shift. Suddenly a horizon is visible, a finishing line appears, and my mind wanders to the dissolution of the current, and the ending of the now, the “this”.
It’s hard to know how to process this, to soundtrack it, what with work an endless onslaught of tasks, Autumn arriving far too early here in England, and my focus drawn elsewhere on my photographic art. Everything seems so full, but so fragile. I was reminded of Rafael Anton Irisarri’s It All Falls Apart recently and made my way back to this well worn record, all shifting guitar drones and pulsing Ambient Techno machinations.
Opener “Shimmer” seems to arrive almost evaporating out of existing, or perhaps into it, its six minutes passing effortlessly by as synth sustains and droning chords seem to erode one another in overlapping detail. Sophomore “Fervent” meanwhile brings a bit more deliberate instrumentation into the fold with its ringing guitar and crackling vinyl hum.
The title track meanwhile croons in this hinterland of cusps, filled such as it is with miscellaneous textures of unknown origins filling out some gentle space in-between, watching the collapse from the porch with a glass of wine in one hand. Then, Tiny Vipers’ Jesy Fortino brings her idiosyncratic vocals to a rework of Joy Division’s “New Dawn Fades”, all heroin and paraffin lamps, her voice a dim light wavering in a sooty miasma of reverbed chords and synths, just trying to find her way through the hardships.
Ultimately it culminates in something that feels like the aftermath of a dizzying blow, with elongate closing “Stagger” tripping over itself as arpeggiations stumble into one another deliriously. Wobbling guitars move haphazardly and dazedly over glassy drone lines that slide us unceremoniously, yet inevitably, into our awaiting future.
Despite the illusory analogue crackle and warmth of its instrumentation, It All Falls Apart barely constitutes a wholesome or sympathetic record. While not entirely depressive, it does match my condition well, one of a certain beautiful uncertainty, watching the spiral, entering the spiral, but never truly losing oneself within it.
It may be a disintegration, but a rebuilding always follows a tearing down, and we don’t have to worry about that until the time comes.