The Colorado collective (loosely an octet for this album) Ligeia Mare takes its name from a lake on Titan, Saturn's largest, most geographically rich and relatively even (luring many to suggest the site of potential extra-terrestrial residence) moon. Concerning LM:
"Ligeia Mare has two predominant types of coastline: 'crenulated' and 'subdued'. The former is characterized by hummocky, eroded terrain, the latter by lower, smoother topography and the presence of more numerous and longer channels."
I might be reading too much into this, but based on the music, the group appears to dedicate their work to this rock's skewed reality-as-we-on-Earth-know-it upon something we terrestrials think of as a place to fish, water ski, ogle muscles and cleavage, reflect upon etc. I digress.
1 is founded on a proclivity of fragile, intimate, lugubrious extended acoustic instrumentation manipulated with gobs of left-to-right knob judders, delay and other studio artifice: soundboards are banged with slinky reverbs, strings get mangled with physical attacks and pitch-bending, falsetto whispers turn into throat-singing or mumbles, and many sound sources are veiled and re-purposed (is that a brush across snare and a crumpled bass drum thump, or finger-taps through multi-fx?). Did I mention panning? The pieces wobble or Doppler across the binaural field, allowing the ensemble to flick in new ideas and gradually silence others without stark juxtaposed distress (where did that lullaby in "House of Dreams" go — and when?); in other words, the disorientation creates a slight of hand to distract your focus. And the crew isn't so concerned about promoting any sonic element as much as the macro aesthetic of passing hallway conversations (heard while fighting off sleep in the foyer).
"Blue Green Shift" (track four) marks a point where the claustrophobia begins to peel away, as glockenspiel and zither offer melodic passages naked against a rising drone. Likewise, continual, tinkering piano meets high register bowing and North African-tinged hum-song throughout "The Old Voice", and everything almost lands on a harmonic center despite the pan-rhythmic percussion sprinkled throughout the revolving construction. The closer, "The Hollow Reed", is a fitting finale that epitomizes Ligeia Mare's work: guitars (lutes?) strumming and adopting a quasi-folk (leaning toward Chinese) fashion in trio with Indian flute and another cagey voice; however, the producer splits the stereo recording of the guitars, stacking them in ear-crossing layers with non-tonal burs and dominant punctuations jumping in to foul the potential of "settled".
The amount of question marks here suggests a positive cultural achievement: something not entirely stable that challenges mythology with mystery.
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