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Bark Psychosis, Hex

Anyone who knows my tastes knows my prediliction for ambient music, or, as I like to call it, "goddambient". Beyond its useful applications in sleeping, napping, dozing, and meditation, ambient music--really well-done, sophisticated ambient music--is a rare creation, which is why people so often equate ambient with "new age" or even worse, the sounds-of-nature CDs that you hear in incense shops. But when done right, ambient music can be beautiful and engaging, and my list of people who do it right should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the genre: Brian Eno (usually credited with "inventing" the genre, or at least coining the name), Aphex Twin, Robert Fripp, Harold Budd--the usual suspects.

But my real love affair with goddambient started with Bark Psychosis. Several years ago I came across the double-disc third volume of Virgin's Brief History Of Ambient series. It covered the artists mentioned above, but it also introduced me to some more obscure artists, including the chronically overlooked Bark Psychosis, and their 10-minute meditation "Pendulum Man", which still ranks as my all-time favorite ambient piece. Eventually I knew I had to seek out the album from which it came, and it's a good thing I found it when I did, because it subsequently went out of print and I'm still not sure how easy it is to find.

The other tracks on Hex are not as amorphous or blissed-out as "Pendulum Man", but they do take its lush soundscapes and couple them with subdued vocals singing wounded lyrics, organic percussion, delicate guitar lines, and more dense song structures built from synth, bass and organ. I listened to Hex a lot that first winter, and that's how it became my default gloomy-mood album: no danger of my melodramatic, twenty-year-old melancholia being impinged by upbeat or encouraging music. Bark Psychosis was/is the pet project of Graham Sutton, a veteran of the English music scene who's also worked under the drum n'bass moniker Boymerang. For Hex, the band's only proper release to date, Sutton co-opted Talk Talk's drummer along with that band's frighteningly subdued and sinister late-period aesthetic.

Of course, I didn't know any of this eight years ago; I just needed something to listen to at college while I was being depressed and theatrical. I was most enamored of the first song, "The Loom", whose cycling layers of percussion and beautiful piano intro belie the dissonant chaos that came later in the album on "Fingerspit" or "Eyes & Smiles". Indeed, after the agreeable second track, "A Street Scene", the rest of the album is a much more demanding affair, all epic ballads that take some getting used to. There is still much beauty to be found here, as on "Absent Friend", which places its lyrics sparely among detuned guitar solos and ornate piano arpeggios. "Big Shot" begins with a gentle synth opening that lulls the listener into a false serenity before a dissonant bass and keys combination and a brilliantly off-time rhythm kick in to complement vague lyrical allusions to a plan gone horribly wrong: it's three a.m. / don't know where we're going / just drive somewhere fast.

"Fingerspit" is a harrowing back-and-forth between arhtyhmic guitar musings with barely audible vocals, and a crashing, damning chorus: reach inside, it's upside down / I can't find any way out / so throw away your promises, speak in tongues / don't reach inside my head. This song is the sound of decomposition; a midsong piano/guitar instrumental passage, which could ordinarily serve as a song's structural glue, is instead given over to banged-out halftones and upper-register sweeps. The song doesn't really end so much as lose steam; one doesn't really notice it's over until startled by the pounding toms that open "Eyes & Smiles". Here, a slippery rhythm on the drums threatens to derail the contemplative, pastoral guitar line while ethereal synths gradually bleed into the mix and Graham Sutton whispers lyrical fragments like hands on my face ... eyes wide / watch them disappear. This is perhaps the only song on the album to build to a discernable climax, as it locks into step with the lyrical exhortaton take it one step further back/ one step, one step and finally crescendoes around Sutton's desperate, strained voice screaming, you gotta go on over and over.

And then, from amidst the rubble, "Pendulum Man" finally arises, and the skies are clear again. I rediscovered this album the year after I graduated from college. I spent most of that year drunk, and most nights I would fall into bed and pass out while listening to the last half of this album, which usually eased my transition into drunken, fitful sleep. This is the sound that Bark Psychosis perfected: simultaneously blurry and lucid, soothing and nightmarish, and it makes Hex a very difficult, beautiful masterpiece.

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