James Shaw’s minimalist electronic outfit, Sigha, based in
Berlin, eschews traditional musicality to create dense, dreary airtight techno.
Living with Ghosts, a patient and plodding
work of soundsmithing, marks his
first full LP.
Though there is something grim and dystopian and, yes, even
ghostly, to Sigha’s rhythms, the record’s cryptic ambience is often more
tedious than immersive. With few exceptions, tracks on Living with Ghosts are relentless, protracted, achingly eerie
affairs. “Scene Couple” contains an undulating interplay of insect-like noises
that rub up against a steady hop of beats. Its follow-up, “Translate,” then
presents a lengthy, murmuring industrial whir, unrolling in ticker-tape
fashion, as if translating the private thoughts of machines, leaking a
cyclical, looping, binary stream of encoded passivity as entrancing as it is
exhausting.
The exhaustion becomes even more apparent on “Faith and
Labor” when Darth Vader-style exhalations move with the music’s increasing
heart rate. The heightened aural brightness of “She Kills Ecstasy,” flirting
dreamily with synthesizers, provides some variation, but generally Living with Ghosts is icy and remote. As
the synths glide into its finale, “Aokigahara,”
named after Japan’s “Haunted Forest of Death,” home of untold suicides, the
album floats gracefully but hardly memorably into a misty oblivion.
Subtly constructed and precisely produced, Living with Ghosts feels like a clinical
procedure, awash in anesthetic numbness. The joyless record, somewhere between a
head-trip and a headache, is a draining experience. While not without artistic
merit, the phantom musical meditations of Living
with Ghosts are glum companions for eager ears to live alongside.
Grade: B-
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