Broken Light – Endless Desert
Rating: ☀☁☁
If you’ve listened to the SUPERCOMPUTER trilogy on TKX Vault and the Computer trilogy by Infinity Frequencies, then Endless Desert by Broken Light is an excellent place to go next. Endless Desert is a nineteen-track signalwave album that plays like an Internet version of Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land. It’s a vaguely conceptual album of what appears to be a pilgrimage through the titular endless desert; the songs themselves don’t have much thematic base, but the tracks are titled in a manner to suggest progression. For example, “Discovery” and “Unearthed Relic”; “A Faint Rumble” and “Desert Storm”; and “Broken Memories” and “Delirium”. Songs somewhat lead into one another; not in the sense of Endless Desert being one song split up into tracks, but in that there are numerous fade-ins and fade-outs at the ends of songs. That’s a bit different for signalwave, which typically utilizes hard cuts to separate tracks (e.g. SUPERCOMPUTER).
Endless Desert utilizes the same ultra-short track lengths and decrepit production of many signalwave albums, but whereas works such as Infinity Frequencies’ Computer trilogy were still very “musical” in the sense of sourcing and presentation, Endless Desert goes straight into non-musical several times, and to rather excellent results. For example, “Static Rain” is seventy-two seconds of pure static that very much sounds like rain, providing some cool juxtaposition of the digital and the natural. “Signal” is a highly processed siren of some sort, and at forty seconds, it’s one of those most effectively-transporting songs on the album. “Desert Storm” is a brief moment of lucidity that’s crowded out by the sound of wind tumbling over a microphone. There are a few moments of musicality (e.g. “Untapped Frequency”, “Discovery”, and “Distant Hope”), and these songs act as scene-changes that establish a new location within the desert.
Endless Desert is great for fans of the aforementioned artists who are looking for something recent. It’s different from most of what goes on over at the BLCR Laboratories label, but that isn’t a knock on its quality. Give it a listen for what would happen if Lawrence of Arabia were directed by Lars von Trier.
Tracklist
1. Wastelands – (1:08)
2. Nomadic – (1:22)
3. Silent Echoes – (1:10)
4. Cavern – (1:20)
5. A Faint Rumble – (0:32)
6. Desert Storm – (0:58)
7. Endless – (1:11)
8. Broken Memories – (0:36)
9. Delirium – (0:49)
10. Mind Warp – (0:47)
11. Nightfall – (1:21)
12. Static Rain – (1:12)
13. Transmission – (1:04)
14. Untapped Frequency – (1:15)
15. Signal – (0:40)
16. Discovery – (1:00)
17. Unearthed Relic – (2:49)
18. Pillar – (1:28)
19. Distant Hope – (1:53)