Scions: To Cry Out In The Wilderness
Out Now
Canadian musicians join together in the spirit of community and the possibility of creating magic. Minimalist, devotional and experimental, MK Bennett attempts to explain.
It’s not so much an album as a soundtrack to something. It is the sound of someone’s heart breaking in front of God, sometimes wordless, almost soundless, spiritual like Coleman or Coltrane. It is a drone flying over an Afghan town, catching only the faint hiss and pass of cheap transistors while the heat fixes paths to move through. Some ancient systems of reference for a long-dead civilization, the bruising static bleeding into feedback that swims in and out of consciousness, cloud cover breaks ice blue Canadian skies before the silence wins, an ozone heavy weight, an unbearable lightness of being.
Moss Lung in biology shrinks the timescale of a natural process down to the pace of humans, and here we find ourselves standing at the edge, breathing in concentration, as the insects descend on the city, fog dancing across rivers, an unanswered prayer and a song cut off too soon. Even When All Was Silent I Was Not Alone suggests the Christian ideal of the two versus one set of footprints, an ancient-sounding choral lament, a bone-deep ache of despair that is nevertheless beautiful as it slowly arches towards its peak, out of time, the natural rhythm of the Levayah.
The Mountain is on fire, and the plants and trees shall burn, while the animals run in hope, not expectation, running out of land like migrating buffalo, escaped convicts, and unruly wildflowers, the cello telling stories the land no longer can, the slow drone speaks as the vocal pitches up at the walls of language, as a deep low percussive rumble builds from the ocean floor. In pop culture, the nearest obvious parallel may be Lisa Gerrard’s soundtrack work, Dead Can Dance, the early 4AD material of experimentalism. But Scions are a nine piece outfit of various highly regarded fields of a more classical bent, taking in folk, choral, ambient electronica, new classicism, and pairings of genres: chamber-jazz, drone-hymn. Based out of Ontario, Canada, and seemingly thrown together through a series of unlikely events, they sound like bones breaking underfoot on a cold Winters day.
To Cry Out In The Wilderness, with its plucked and muted strings and Tannoy robot announcements, the ancient and modern in juxtaposition, like an empty airport at 5 am, learning language through thickened glass while the nicotine-stained coasters curl up with yellowed corners. Fight Song, in its way, is the most accessible piece here, yet it still sounds like alien signals from a deep, dark, and distant galaxy that briefly tuned into a jazz station and a bluegrass station before the less frivolous pursuit of war.
The aesthetic is equally thoughtful, the cover initially an eye-straining hint of the Fighting Temeraire, Turner’s depiction of a once great warship being taken away and broken down for scrap, but ( St Georges Round Church On Fire) is a picture of the tower of the building the album was recorded in, burned down in 1994 and eventually restored fully in 2002. Despite the tonal similarities and different histories, the Turner picture would have been a perfect viewing while listening to the album from beginning to end.
Over is a gossamer thin and fragile two minutes of John Cage allusions, a barely there lesson in simple dynamics, a loaded silence while the brain makes sense. There is little doubt that this part -improvisational, militantly avant-garde ensemble has struck gold in this coming together, this lightning strike of fortune, A Musical Sermon on the Mount, accidentally breaking the heart of God, preaching to the commonality of beauty and wonder.
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All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram
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