The album unfolds with the patience of a long tracking shot, fostering the illusion of being swallowed up by darkness. Opener “Moon” begins with a rich, buzzing synthesizer drone and the huff of naked breath through a horn; as the chord expands, revealing new frequencies, Williams sketches the tentative outline of a minor-key melody before he’s joined by the searching cries of his bandmates. Run through titanic reverb, their horns float over the jagged sawtooth landscape of the nine-minute tone poem.
Compared to the ominous penumbra of “Moon,” “Visage” is a tribute to the clarion gleam of three-horn music; the players weave an elegiac succession of slowly shifting harmonies enlivened by unexpected tonal pivots and slow-motion soloing from Vandever. It’s as graceful as Stars of the Lid. After that melodic highlight, the candle snuffs out, and we’re plunged into darkness. Williams has described Odu as “a process of unraveling,” and “location.echo” bears that out: All tonal elements fall away as the music breaks down into hissing breath, percussive taps, and what sounds like bat wings flapping and many-legged critters rustling in the shadows.
In an interview with Foxy Digitalis, Williams admitted of his experiences spelunking, “It freaked me out.” That fear was one of the reasons he was drawn to the idea of caves in the first place. Where much of his work is rooted in lived experience and family history, he said, “This cave thing just feels like a primal, I’m just a human being that’s afraid of the dark.” The second half of the album ventures deeper still, offering a perpetually shifting array of sounds, ideas, and treacherous terrain. In the brief “Waning,” Williams solos lyrically against a backdrop of nature recordings and clanging bells before “Stemmed outwards” destroys all certainties: For nearly 15 minutes, staticky bursts and squiggles twist in elliptical loops that recall Philip Jeck or late-’90s Mille Plateaux, until Shiroishi claws his way through with a harrowing solo.
