I'm usually intrigued when and electronic artists attempts to create and "organic" sounding release. Intrigued, but usually disappointed. Not so with "I Swear By All the Flowers" the third release by Detroit project Life Toward Twilight.
Such attempts usually fail for one of two reasons. Frequently the result doesn't present a unified whole. The electronic sounds and the organic sounds never seem to flow together, one or the other seems tacked on. If this isn't the problem then the attempt to recreate non-electronic instruments falls flat and the listener is left wondering why the artist didn't just hire additional musicians for the recording.
Daniel Tuttle, the man behind Life Toward Twilight, side-steps the above issues by focusing on two primitive "instruments": the music box and static.
Both are convincingly recreated with synthesizers. And since neither are traditional elements in either electronic or organic music Life Toward Twilight is able to carve out their own niche. The sound here isn't really even comparable to ambient OR ethereal artists. It is Something Else.
This album does share elements with those two genres. It can be put on in the background like ambient so that it doesn't so much overwhelm you as seep into your subconscious. Like ethereal it has a haunting, otherworldly quality.
But unlike either of them "I Swear By All the Flowers" has a lost, fractured feel. The music box melodies sound less like thoroughly and lifelessly explored compositions and more like the primal, even primordial, nucleus of song. As such they remain relatively brief experiences. The pieces end with a fading out and the return of static. It's as if your listening to a radio that refuses to stay tuned to a channel, just as you become familiar with a song it is lost to you.
Music boxes have been with us since the 19th century. It is a sound that's old and, if handled poorly, may sound cartoonish or trite. But on this CD the sound never cheesy, is quiet and inviting like returning to rooms in a house that you had forgotten about. Static is a modern sound, but it may be a dying sound as well. With the revolution of digital media more people are likely to hear music on a CD or as an MP3 than on the radio. Satellite radio removes static as well. Soon static will be something we're more likely to talk about and remember than actually encounter, just like a music box.
The CD is haunting, but never haunted. We're not taken on some heavy-handed "creepy" journey. This isn't the soundtrack for a horror film about undead tots in a contaminated nursery. It's the sound off an old, decaying orphanage where the echoes of children and songs just want to be tucked in until the end of time.
