Vacant Stations - Clones

Music should aspire to link us to universal truth. Even ambient music can do that, as Vacant Stations demonstrates with great elegance here.

Westerners like to move freely. We like to travel great distances; eat a wide variety of foods; purchase a dizzying array of highly specific products marketed to our tastes. We aren’t limited by the rhythms of night and day; of seasons; of social propriety. Our places and spaces have evolved to meet our demands. What do they say about us? Here is an album that seems perfectly crafted to show us. We all have an image that we hold in our minds of the total creep-out that we’d get from one of these populated spaces suddenly bereft of life and purpose: it’s why we love Urban Exploration. Clones is Urbex for the ears, then.

This is drone done right: patience and perseverance over thirteen tracks which open and close like portals between the listener and a succession of vast echoing warehouses, tunnels and even retail spaces necessitated by our twenty-first century appetites.

Expert, subtle layers of synth which occasionally fatten out into buzz and then dissolve again into hollowed submerged spaces float over a spare bassline powered by a creepiness almost sub-aural. Sometimes the whirring of wheezing, uneven machinery intrudes uneasily into this mélange like a reminder of entropy. All is not peaceful in the abandoned landscape of Clones; routine maintenance is required. Ain’t that a universal truth?

We are invited to self-examine as we ponder the meaning of single-word track titles like 'Lapse', 'Penultima' and even 'Publix'. Who would have associated that bustling grocery chain with the ominous string of underwater chimes like a deadened jingle that haunt this latter piece with such melancholy? Certainly no shopper in the daylight hours, comparing packages of frozen broccoli and thinking about getting to soccer practice.

Let’s do what the track compels us to as listeners: empty the store of customers. Let the fluorescent overheads flicker and die until the space is lit at a quarter of their wattage. Peruse the aisles and freezer cases alone, with nothing but the sound of our mortal heartbeats in our ears, and the deep internal realization that our Western food supply is fragile, susceptible to even the smallest disruption, and based upon the unquestioned labor of the nameless and the unprotected in fields and fisheries.

Care about soccer practice now? I don’t. And this is the dark gift of Clones.
Sep 07 2017