The full-length debut of Lisa Lerkenfeldt’s lowercase ambient drift marks the Aussie artist’s most significant release to date, slotting neatly into the roster of Félicia Atkinson & Bartolomé Sanson’s Shelter Press and gently caressing our earlobes with a sometimes barely-there palette of peach wood combs, contact microphones, piano, strings, and feedback that coalesce into tumultuous movements beyond the horizon.
‘Collagen’ introduces Lerkenfeldt’s sound like a wild meadow, navigating negative space for subliminal whispers of dread and beauty, as the liner notes explain so well, her muse "seems one of evasion as much as evocation”. Aspiring to “elevate the everyday”, her music feels naturally ripe with variegated in/organic textures and slow, hypnotic melodies that stealthily attune listeners to her wavelength in a manner that she’s roughly finessed on previous tapes and digital releases with native label Longform Editions, Vienna Press and Canada’s Aught Void.
As the album unfolds, Lerkenfeldt’s hazy location recordings, washed out strings and blanched electronics waver the weather vane between sombre and melancholy with a real windswept, isolationist feel best consumed alone rather than as a communal experience. A bit like sheltering in front of a shifting landscape, the album plays thru Gas-like string pads gilded with elusive vocoder vox of ‘In Her Hair’ before dematerialising into elemental abstraction for 9 minutes of ‘Collagen’, whereas ‘Gates of Desire’ displays a tidier knack for arranging classically puckered ambient-pop keys, and the B-side expresses more liminal, hypnagogic states in the creaking gloom of ‘The Weight of History’. It all shares the same, rare air, a promise of something inviting but intangible drawing you deeper in.
