Loren Dent, Empires and Milk

Listening to Empires and Milk is like breathing. It’s easy to forget that you’re even listening, so environmentally permeating is the sonic wash. That such an organic feel evolves from keyboards, computers, and sound loops, with very few acoustic instruments or unprocessed sounds, is a testament to the soundscaping prowess of Austin musician Loren Dent. Empires is only Dent’s second full length release, but the maturity and confidence of his sound compositions reveal an artist who is anything but sophomoric.

In an ingenious moment of meta-composition, the painstakingly constructed, cut-and-splice nature of the music is sonically referenced as the title track opens the album with the sound of shears studiously disassembling something, the obvious indication being magnetic tape. Then, as vague sounds begin to swirl in the background, these pieces are shuffled together and fed into a reel-to-reel, which begins, fuzzily, to play them back to you, complete with tape hiss. The process repeats itself throughout the track, and indeed throughout the album, with occasional breaks in the sound, as if a piece of blank tape was inadvertently spliced in between sections every once in a while.

However accidental these intrusions may seem, they are part of an incredibly engineered piece of music masquerading, oddly enough, as an engineered piece of music. On top of all this conceit drifts an undulating mass of keyboards, punctuated by highly metallic-yet-soft guitar incursions. A vague beat, reminiscent of an irregular heartbeat in its organic pulse, helps add to the feeling that this is a living, breathing organism, despite its literalist tendencies. Nothing in this palette is comforting or unnerving — at least not in any sort of obvious way. Somehow, though, the piece manages to fill the air with a vague, buzzing dread. Toward the end of the track, the keyboard and fuzz haze lifts, leaving Eno-esque treated guitar sounds and a shuffling tape-loop-in-reverse effect to close the piece, which fades like a fog rolling away from a dim shoreline.

As with most atmospheric music, Empires must be described mostly in terms of moods and silhouettes, rather than content and structure. If the title track brought a feeling of engineered alienation and conjured images of cold, bleak landscapes, then “Essential Drifts” follows like a warm sunrise. Answering the mostly synthetic sounds of the opening track, Dent brings chiming and echoing guitars to the fore, like a more restrained, less grandly sweeping Glenn Branca. This bright burst of “real” instrumentation matches a more comfortable, less ominous mood.