Soundtrack composers don’t seem to need films to cue inspiring, haunting scores anymore. Take, for example, the new double album by Californian composer William Ryan Fritch.
The story that goes along with this fabulous artifact is as impressive as the music is. We let the label, Lost Tribe Sounds, tell the story below, courtesy of their Bandcamp site:
‘Built Upon a Fearful Void‘ was an album seemingly fated to never be completed. For the last 8 years the album had been recorded and either lost or discarded three times; a leak that water logged and ruined most of the half dozen tape reels the original album was recorded on, a destroyed and unrecoverable hard drive in 2018 that held the near completed mixes and finally in 2021 voluntarily letting go of what remained of the salvaged material to rerecord the album entirely using only faint flickers of the old tapes and cassettes that held the remnants of the old songs.
It is a two part record—meditating on lost epochs, feeble mythologies, and the many deep gulfs in human knowledge and perception. Each volume taking the listener through their own unique multi-textured explorations of the union and disunion of sonorities for pipe organ, reed instruments, voice, viola da gamba, prepared piano, pedal steel, viola d’amore and banjo.
There is a dark, aquatic, slightly claustrophobic element to the music, but it wraps your ears up pleasantly and manages to maintain your attention with all those instruments blending together elegantly.