Barn Owl – Ancestral Star

Apparently Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras, the San Fran duo that make up Barn Owl, had the novel luxury on this, their third album, of being able to really take their time over its recording and programming. This more considered, conscious and meticulous approach to crafting their songs – as opposed to the organic evolutions of yore – appears to have paid off, resulting in this textured work of mystery and atmosphere.

You can definitely hear that this is music unafraid of taking its time. The largely instrumental pieces move at a pace that sometimes feels as if it is dictated by the moon or a tide. ‘Sundown’: portentous and elongated; ‘Visions in Dust’: with silent gaps between its twangs; ‘Night’s Shroud’: the soundtrack for a lone cowboy on the edge of the world, slowly dwindling to a faint buzz, then nothing – all are resolutely spacious and unhurried. When ‘Ancestral Star’ picks up its pace it does so by increments so imperceptible that the swoops and dissonant noise of its later stages arrive without fanfare.

At times Barn Owl’s music could be described as “drone” (‘Sundown’, ‘Ancestral Star’, ‘Twilight’, and ‘Light From The Mesa’, perhaps), but it mostly defies any neat categorisation. Alongside undoubted elements of a dark, black kind of doom-metal, many tracks also by contrast evoke a sun-baked, wind-and-sand-swept Spaghetti Western, like the aptly named ‘Visions In Dust’ and ‘Flatlands’. In fact, this is one of the best albums that I have encountered for near-perfect track titles – often succeeding in encapsulating the mood of the music quite brilliantly. You can probably take a good stab at what those two tracks might sound like, and again with ‘Awakenings’ and ‘Incantation’. Each time you would more than likely be right.

Various different textures are used to vary the sound and flow of the album. On ‘Twilight’ piano arpeggios – more like a warm-up exercise than a tune per se – feature: rapid and repetitive over the background buzz with which they form a contrast. ‘Flatlands’ is all echoey Spanish guitar, organic, unplugged and improvisatory in feel, while several tracks (‘Visions In Dust’, ‘Flatlands’, ‘Incantation’) use a kind of wordless vocal, at times light and airy, at others deep and ominous.

The album is also given shape by the motifs that are repeated from track to track. ‘Vision In Dust’ has elements repeated later on in both ‘Light From The Mesa’ and ‘Flatlands’, for example; and then different aspects of the latter are picked up again in ‘Incantation’. This gives a satisfying form and coherence to the work overall, a sense that there is some kind of grand plan behind it all.

To a certain extent then, it seems invidious or counter-productive to highlight individual “stand out tracks”. However, ‘Ancestral Star’ (fluttery wonderment leading slowly and subtly into dissonant grandeur), ‘Flatlands’, with its orchestral-tune-up amorphous, mystical atmosphere, and ‘Awakening’ with the most distinctive tune on the album, despite starting out sounding like a swampy prehistoric beast stirring from its muddy nest – are all particularly worthy of mention.

This is definitely an album to appreciate in its entirety, though. That way the curious, compelling, elemental music (sounding almost literally hewn from “the elements”) will best reveal itself to the listener, charting and snaking its route into and around your mind.