High Plains
Cinderland (Kranky)

Knowing that High Plains is a project of Scott Morgan (Loscil) and seeing its topographic cover art, anticipated sounds may begin to form in your subconscious. After all, Morgan is a master of sprawling, glacial ambient soundscapes that capture the majesty of supernatural British Columbia.

Then you listen to it, and the work of Wisconsin cellist Mark Bridges drifts to the foreground. There is something sublimely haunting about Bridges’s work, a brooding yet elegant quality that inspires fantastic, unprecedented depth in Morgan’s orchestrations.

It was good fortune for us that Morgan and Bridges happened to meet when the Banff Centre for the Arts booked them for simultaneous residencies back in 2014. Two years later, they settled down in an old schoolhouse in the small town of Saratoga, Wyoming, for a couple of weeks, the results of which can be heard on Cinderland.

With Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise running around in their heads and high-valley terrain all around them, their collaboration channels cello, piano, and subtly manipulated field recordings into an emotionally resonant nexus of neoclassical and experimental ambient sounds.