A few days ago I was talking to one of my photography friends about a collaborative project they’d asked me about doing together sometime later in the year, since a few months have gone by without us talking about it and just refreshing the idea in our minds. Actually it was his idea, and specifically he wanted to focus on this theme of loneliness and isolation, so we were chatting about aesthetics and inspirations and so on, kind of ways to start thinking about approaching it.

And he asked me whether I needed to feel a certain way to be able to take a project on, that I had to relate to the emotive heart or concept of the thing whilst working on it. Yes, was my answer: it’s been true for my previous little photo projects, and it’s been true for the majority of my reviews here. Perhaps the sign of a bad writer, but given how I cover these pieces and what I write about, connection in the moment is important. The right album at the wrong time is unwritten: so it goes.

I came home late last night from the cinema and the slightly mild Spring evening air was intoxicating. The weather the last few days has been warm and bright, green and floral and the night air just smelled full, redolent, heady. This is relevant because I’ve been struggling to talk about Battens recently, just couldn’t find the right words or the right space for it, and it was in huffing the perfumery yesterday that I realised that we just weren’t synchronised, moving tangential to one another. For Loess, in all their idiosyncrasy, have made another great album but one that just feels slightly too maudlin to intersect with my life right now.

Battens is a bead on a string of somewhat undefinable records from the American pair, IDM and Ambient Techno structures rising from the darkness all mysteriously named and more mysteriously structured. It’s this eeriness and iciness that makes it allochthonous to the present climes: opener “Strake” for example moving in notably chilly synthetics and shuffling beats. Interior “Koepcke”‘s fluted flutterings croon and keen in the background to slightly more empowered movements, and despite its clean and crisp production it has a vague reminiscence of wind whistling through a graveyard, or perhaps wending through the masts in a wintry marina.

Closing “Rime” obviously underscores that icy sentiment in its titling, trickling along like some semi-frozen stream moving languidly in subdued humming tones whilst staccato textures drip and freeze over the one another. Slowly accumulating, gathering depth and density as it coats its insidious presence over the unyielding ground below, one layer at a time.

This is one for retreats, for emptier Winter nights and dispassionately grey and cool days, not for the bright and burgeoning throes of a world in full swing. It would probably make an excellent soundtrack to this loneliness-themed photo-project later in the year. Maybe if one were to turn the lens to geopolitics and sociocultural issues rife everywhere at the moment one might find something unhappily relatable, but there’s plenty else to be distracting at the moment.