At some point when you’re young you learn (I’m assuming this is sort of general knowledge) that coral aren’t single organisms like most of the animals you’re introduced to early on, but rather these vast colonies of teeny polyps that live and grow together. All those funky arrangements and outcroppings you see in photos of coral reefs are these complex skeletal homes for their colonial inhabitants, form slowly emerging from the accumulating efforts.
Recently, and this is gonna feel like a hard sidebar but I promise I’ll make it relevant, I feel like the Winter Fugue has really set in and I find myself very unsure in my thoughts and feelings, stress and self-esteem all over the place. That inner confusion set me thinking about that philosophical question of who’s in charge within, of the origin of thoughts and consciousness. Words come out of my mouth without specific effort, my limbs and digits move with some kind of inexorable impulse without direct thought: who is “me”? Are the thoughts and feelings, actions and outputs, me, or something else, some interior colony built up neuron by neuron, working collectively in the abstract?
Not just who am I: what am I.
I can imagine the folds and furls of the innards of my brain as some animal colony, suspended as it is in the gentle cushioning of cerebrospinal fluid. Form appearing singular, activity multivariate, humming with a complex web of electrochemical events to form a unified whole.
In the aqueous drones of Coral Morphologic and Nick Léon’s Projections of a Coral City, I see a warped mirror to consciousness. I feel particularly drawn to the eerie evocations of “Precipice”, filled as it is with heavy, negative synthetics that glow in slow chords with some cursed Cherenkov light emanating from unseen depths. It’s the most remarkably and notably off-kilter, like my shower-thought philosophising in that way, whereas the others have a buoyancy and lightness to their motion.
Opener “Deep Call” and interior “Discovery” bob and sway on deeply bedded field fragments of watery movement, especially the latter, like rain seen upside down on the surface from below. Thin and slow drones melt out of the mix, the former building itself in staggering textural developments like the stratified apartments of the reef rising into the water column. The mid album meanwhile makes way to lose itself into bucolic steel string guitar like some beach-side retreat on the shores of the mind.
Before all too long “Reach Out” comes to close the little loop of the EP, harking back to the beginnings of “Deep Call” heard so shortly ago and yet emerging changed from our descent into the humbling depths of analysis. Drones splay out once more, bass thrumming the very aether of our supporting medium to rise in some longwave pulse to break on the surface, deep impulse becoming action beyond knowing.
Sometimes self-handling requires taking a step back and thinking of ourselves in the third person: I am not my thoughts. I am – we are – just bags of electric goop that for some reason have been blessed with the ability to feel anxious. Perhaps this feels unjust but I tend to think I’d prefer to be a brain floating in its own private swimming pool, rather than the mindless, though majestic, reef.
No offence, coral.