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| sps26120 - to be released on March 27th, 2026 NATHAN AMUNDSON THINGS FALL APART CD, 6-panel digisleeve |
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| Contrary to the implication of the title, Nathan Amundson’s new album "Thing Fall Apart" holds quite tightly at its center. In fact, for a decade-spanning compilation of unrelated 'singles', the collection somehow comes together rather poetically and seamlessly - albeit in some-sort of slow-mo, existential collapse much more in line with the title. By 'singles', please don’t get it twisted with the modern, music parlance - more so indicating pieces made with no original intention of ever putting them together on an album. Textural guitar squalls and sound sculpture; field recordings and desolate piano strikes - each 'barely released' in digital form into the abyss of digital streaming platforms. Mastered together here and tied up with a black little bow, they do develop a sort of structure or arc. We enter through some cavernous alien tunnel (Ujaayi) and for a moment even hear sounds of our natural world (Haruki Marukami) before an endless valley of Neurolink factories starts exploding all around us (We’ll Be the Last Ones Here; Chaos & Noise). Smoke 'em if you got ‘em, folks. Throughout the quarter century of plumbing the very depths with his minimalist, exploratory amorphous band Rivulets, Amundson has always made droning, sound installation pieces on the side under his own name - odd, in that Rivulets’s sound has a less abstracted, more-human fingerprint. At this point, I think it’s okay to say his creations aren’t necessarily for everyone. But perhaps this record in particular is for those stretches when you feel like no one at all. You’re out here on 3rd shift, monitoring the bottomless pit, making sure it remains bottomless. Carbon Dioxide gales of an industrial tundra humming up through your hardhat skullcap, sounding less and less natural and more like gusts through the steely hollows of never-built skyscrapers. Punishing nethersounds that still manage to lull you into their cadence. In Amundson’s deepest gauzy drones, one can almost see the screaming faces of the business-suited men and women pouring around the corner trailed by a miles-high monstrous fold of a black plume. It doesn’t end with a whisper, I assure you that. There’s something beyond any en vogue pop-apocalyptica at play on "Things Fall Apart"’ something even more fathomless than the mere End of the World. It’s out there in the black velvet of whatever is waiting. The album's spare, deep tones carry all the weight of the Yeats poem (“The Second Coming”) from where Amundsen plucks the title. “The Second Coming” is a work from which many of our best have drawn inspiration - Joan Didion, Chinua Achebe, Walker Percy. In his pulsing, sometimes punishing / sometimes darkly gorgeous experiments, Amundson really brings to life the timeless unease of the Yeats’ poem. The beauty and the horror, if you will. Every generation thinks it’s going to see the end of the world. One of these days, one is gonna be right. Amundson’s "Things Fall Apart" is how being right will feel. - Eric Deiness order |
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