loscil – Clara – Album Review
by Killian Laher

Scott Morgan who records as loscil has carved an individual path in the ambient world.  This time around, he has sampled an orchestra and manipulated the sound, making it one of his more difficult albums. It’s on the darker side of his work, along the lines of 2016’s Monument Builders.  Lux kicks off the album in a pretty forbidding way, building on what sounds like a sampled cello.  Lumina and Vespara are more like you would expect from loscil, little keyboard motifs emerging to create an atmospheric track.  The ten minute Stella has the spacey otherworldiness of the more out there Stars of the Lid, or even Daniel Lanois.

Sol is a little warped and gauzy, a sort of ‘amb-gaze’ track, while Flamma is more comforting than anything else, its soft sounds will envelope you.  Orta is quite zen, a slice of calm before the epic, closing title track.

It’s more an album to let wash over you than identify individual tracks . Some years ago Library Tapes had an album called Feelings for Something Lost, that could be used to describe this collection quite well.  There’s an uncertainty in the sound that means this wouldn’t be a loscil album for the uninitiated, more one for the committed fan.

Vespera