Jake Muir
Pareidolia
enmossed
Ambient music often benefits from a conceptual anchor. More than just a foothold for a listener, a novel idea tends to guide an artist to a more intentional expression beyond the pure exploration of sound. Jake Muir has established his reputation on this very principle, developing a compelling catalog of albums navigating all kinds of thematic jump-off points from bath houses to ’90s illbient. On his new album Pareidolia, which marks his second outing on constantly intriguing ambient label enmossed, he’s zoomed in on snatched moments of levity buried in the thick of black and death metal songs, repurposing his finds and letting them bloom into vast beatless pieces.
Anyone who has savoured the visceral experience of Sunn O))) live will relate to the vast sonic potential hidden in doom-laden, distortion-soaked guitar tones, but Muir strikes a more delicate note. Along with the expected, looming bass drones that ebb and flow through Pareidolia, there are plenty of higher-frequency shimmers and impulses with less obvious lineage. With the concept in mind, a vaporous cloud crossing the stereo field might well hide a guttural, snarling vocal inside—this is something that manifests many times across the album. Elsewhere, similarly pitched sounds with a more percussive cadence call to mind the metallic clicks and grinds that come from running a plectrum up and down guitar strings.
No sound source is immediately discernible, but what Muir reliably musters throughout Pareidolia is a depth of feeling, finding an emotional core behind the noise and aggression of extreme metal. As with so many outsider genres, the untrained ear hears ugliness where a devoted listener discerns subtle fluctuations, harmonic couplings and rhythmic shifts that speak volumes. Through his surgical practice, Muir seems to have elicited these feelings, or maybe simply conjured his own, from the source material. Across an album brimming with wraith-like shrouds and ominous sub bass, moments of restrained beauty shimmer into earshot and make this album so much more than a one-dimensional dark ambient excursion, which is what Pareidolia easily could have been.
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