VPC Ensemble - Life Is A Strange Loop (Self Release) [Ambient]
- The Slow Music Movement
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
The VPC Ensemble are not your average troupe: leader Dash Lunde on electric guitar, flute(s), sampler and mood-altering rattle, Alexia Charoud providing vocals that seem to drift in from a neighbouring spirit world, Evan Pittson bowing a plugged-in viola, Lee Hooper with his flute attached to an array of pedals, Zachary Berns providing a low-gravity approach to drums and percussion, and just for good measure, Kacie Boblitt moving to the music whilst adorned with wearable percussion - a welcome stage presence during live shows. As you can imagine, they don't sound very average either.
Life Is a Strangle Loop's title and themes owe a debt to the thinking and writing of polymath Douglas Hofstadter, who is news to me, but sounds like quite the character. His thinking has been inspirational for many across a broad range of fields, and he even dabbled in musical composition. For his debut, Lunde has homed in on his "idea of consciousness folding back on itself to create the self", and gone possibly the only route open to him to do such a bold concept justice - full on cosmic ambient.
The album captures the infinite echoes of decades-old music: from becalmed space rock, vintage ambient experiments and the ethereal jazz of Alice Coltrane; and, despite the passing of some of the protagonists, weaves the still-resonating creativity into a wondrous, gaseous ambient odyssey. It sounds like ego was left at the studio door, the musicians preferring to intertwine their sounds for the greater good, with only rare moments of individual discernability - not a bad thing, as so much credit is due.
Variously: classical grace underpins moments of levitating woodwinds; Lunde's guitar floats, gently and quizzically, over sonic sunrises; the musicians occasionally spiral upwards looking for elevated answers to the collective madness outside the studio doors and intermittently send packed waves of right-thinking frequencies, past the walls of drone interceptors, and into the corridors of warring powers, whilst wellness-imbuing, new-age frequencies are altruistically, and refreshingly, channelled to the have-nots rather than the have-mores.
The album is all this and more and, like Hofstadter's thinking, will be many things to many people. But at its core is the distillation of 50 years of the finest ambient endeavour; a welcome reminder for the younger generations of the power of counter-cultural movements and thought in an increasingly homogenous, algorithm-directed, AI-sloppy world, and, I imagine, one of those rare beasts, an ambient live show worth seeing as well as hearing.
Playlist Companion
Find VPC Ensemble in the Slow Oddities Playlist.
