Loscil
Adrift (Independent)

Scott Morgan, the audio experimenter better known as Loscil, has long been fascinated by conjuring landscape-inspired sounds. Sketches From New Brighton (2012) reinterpreted the sight of carrier ships by the Second Narrows as ethereal stretches of sonic ambiance, while the mournful electro-organic soundscapes of his 2014 full-length, Sea Island, were partly inspired by walks around Richmond’s Iona Beach.

Now his new Adrift EP takes on especially topological properties, coming packaged as an interactive smartphone app loaded with moody music and a series of detailed maps.

The long-in-the-works project uniquely comprises four pieces made up of various unending audio components, which play at random when you cue up a track. In essence, this means every listen is a new audio experience.

It’s hard to say how these songs will run each time you open the app, but “Baychimo” may well be its darkest tapestry. Every once in a while you’ll be treated to a lonely tinkle of piano, but it generally traffics in upsetting, echoing drones and a foreboding flicker of collaborator Mark Bridges’s cello. Elsewhere, a sickening ripple of synth bass surges through “Orlova”, but depending on how the app’s AI is feeling, that ominous tone may come juxtaposed against heavenly plucked harp or a halo’s glow of calming new-age electronics.

As this goes on, your smartphone screen displays ever-shifting, ice-white topographical maps that each reference a vessel lost at sea. “Orlova” shouts out a Yugoslavian cruise ship that is suspected to have sunk in the North Atlantic in 2013; “Ryou Un Maru” is dedicated to a Japanese boat rocked out into the Pacific during a 2011 typhoon and ultimately sunk in U.S. waters.

Cold, desolate, and unpredictable as the waters that claimed the vessels in question, Adrift makes for a fresh but unsettling adventure from a master soundsmith.