Until the Quiet Comes Track by Track Review
On Until The Quiet Comes, everything is geared towards the systematic erasure of what came earlier: the huge amount of item packed into every second; the beats that escape the grid and state in unexpected places, challenging the mind'south attempts to predict their trajectory; the continued primacy of any sensory experiences are available right at present; the almost entirely uniform - fifty-fifty monotonous - nature of the album's sound palette, which for much of its length barely raises above a whisper's volume; the comparative lack of hooks or repeated motifs to latch onto. So each time Until The Placidity Comes plays, it'due south as if it'due south existence discovered for the first fourth dimension again. It'due south the supreme magic ear trick for neophile digital natives - the perpetual illusion of novelty no matter how many times it's previously been experienced, fooling the listener into feeling similar they're experiencing something brand new every fourth dimension.
None of Steven Ellison'southward music to engagement, then, has so fully articulated the contraction that lies at the center of his post-Los Angeles output as Until The Placidity Comes. It is at one time fluid and, by its very computer-created nature, unchanging and rigid. Information technology hints at the looseness and spontaneity of Ellison's jazz forebears (his aunt and uncle are Alice and John Coltrane) when in fact every detail is meticulously planned, prescribed and fixed in identify, worked and reworked, layered, folded and shaped to the nth degree. Until The Quiet Comes washes around and laps at the listener like balmy tropical water, promising to carry yous in its slipstream to places even it doesn't know yet - just in truth its road has already been precisely mapped. Despite the emotions and headstates it provokes, its very lack of plasticity makes it fundamentally un-dreamlike. Is it wrong to criticise a record for not actually beingness different every time y'all drib the needle, touch the screen or click the mouse?
Narrative is everything when dealing with a record as perplexing as Until The Tranquillity Comes. In interviews Ellison has spoken nearly his desire to return to a more modest and settled place for this album, afterwards Cosmogramma's sprawling attempts to map the universe. Indeed, the latter album occupies a peculiar infinite on my record shelf. I'm glad it'southward sitting there crying out for attention, and I'm grateful for its existence, and on the irregular occasions that I sit downward to heed to information technology in full I'm still impressed and moved past it. Also equally signaling a significant jump in ambition for Ellison's music upon its release in 2010 - taking steps away from the slouched post-Dilla instrumentals of his before years - it was a meaning tape in wider terms. Information technology clearly described an emergent tendency in the electronic underground towards stitching every bit many reference points equally (in)humanly possible into always-smaller regions of infinite: in his case jazz, Aphex-styled shattered breaks, R&B, soul, musique concrète and so forth (were you to listen closely enough, the list could probably be ever-expanding, matching the implications of the album'southward title). But over the past couple of years it's been tough to summon up whatever particular inclination to actually listen to Cosmogramma with any regularity. Its overstimulated feel and abrupt changes in tack confound the memory in much the same mode equally day-to-twenty-four hours exposure to the mundane to-and-fro-ing of Twitter, Facebook and multiple electronic mail inboxes - in other words, the neural states it provokes mimic modern online reality a piffling too closely for total comfort.
Until The Tranquility Comes represents a step away from that item phase of Ellison's own personal narrative, a motility into inner rather than outer space. Here it's the corridors of his own mind that he's set out to map. Listening through the anthology gives the sense that you're peering into or spying on his dreams, confounded by their logic (certainly it's hard to imagine anyone other than Flying Lotus taking his music forth the pathways it travels here). Even his guest vocalists - Erykah Badu and Niki Randa, plus previous collaborators Thom Yorke and Laura Darlington - are disembodied phantoms, reanimated figments of his imagination stripped of agency and directed to their roles past Ellison's hidden. Yorke'south appearance is specially striking: for such a distinctive and well-known phonation he's comparatively robbed of that identity, seeping abroad into the backdrop in way that recalls Roger Robinson's ghostly presence on King Midas Sound'southward Waiting For You.
It'southward perhaps unsurprising that Ellison would have chosen this route for this anthology. As much equally anything else, it'due south hard not to suspect that making Cosmogramma must have been a cathartic and draining experience - he lost his mother during the time it was existence recorded. What'due south funny from a listener's perspective, however, is that although the textural palette and mood of Until The Serenity Comes is strikingly different to Cosmogramma (it largely sheds the caustic riptides of dissonant synth and low-slung, sleazy feel in favour of graceful strings, harp and harpsichord that verge on the saccharine) the actual sensations of listening to the ii records - memory bleed, disorientation - aren't every bit different as surface impressions might advise.
Though where Cosmogramma was a riotous and hugely energetic whirl of new sounds, ideas and associations, Until The Tranquility Comes is muted and monotone. Information technology'due south beautifully produced and sumptuous, with an amazing depth of field - synthetic strings, sub-bass and fragile beats are speckled with shards of the human voice and live instrumentation, while somewhere in the distance locked grooves trace out intricate spirographs of static. Nonetheless, its capacity for expressiveness is kept in check by its uniform colour scheme and downbeat experience. It's frustratingly slight and polite, at times even verging on bland, where its predecessor was rude, volatile and unpredictable. Like an orchestral score for an animated kids' movie, if you lot're not concentrating attentively on the music, it can only sink away into the groundwork - salve a few (albeit all too brief) curveballs similar 'Sultan's Request', whose fat rips of bass leering into view are welcome reminders of the earthiness and grit of Los Angeles and Ellison'south Brainfeeder contemporaries.
It's but during the anthology'south terminal third that its composition and sequencing live up to the skill involved in its cosmos. Yorke'southward turn on 'Electric Candyman' is equally spooky as the rails'due south title suggests, compulsive repeats of "Await into the mirror" matched past drums that jostle and pound similar an irregular heartbeat, and Randa'due south vocal performance on 'Hunger' is the highlight of the entire record, finding her bristling with restrained aggression above a peculiarly loopy, half-decomposed bankroll track that recalls The Flagman. It's at this point that the Disneyishness of the album's first half is replaced by the tense ambiguity of a Studio Ghibli score, its animated inhabitants mutating from woodland creatures fabricated alluring (big optics, wholesome voices) into strange and grotesque beasts, all jaws and stomachs, with only the slightest ground in earthly reality.
Then both on its own terms, and those of the thou narratives information technology engages with (the shifting identities of both humans and electronic music forms in a digital age; the internet's erosion of memory processes; its existence equally a maximalist record with such modest ambitions), Until The Quiet Comes is clearly an important and significant album. Like Cosmogramma - to which it feels like a sister recording - that doesn't necessarily mean that it'south an easy or completely fulfilling listen, or that it'south an anthology I'll experience inclined to revisit with any detail regularity. It's flawed, merely unlike the vast majority of Ellison's current contemporaries, its flaws and contradictions remain as intriguing every bit its positive points, and lend themselves to repeat listens: each time it'due south played, I'thousand struck by a nagging suspicion that I haven't heard this particular version of the anthology before. Which Ellison would no doubt approve of.
Source: https://thequietus.com/articles/10302-flying-lotus-until-the-quiet-comes-review