Eschatology (2018)

This album collects material written between 2012 and 2017. Some of the music was written with the idea of evoking desolate spaces, times, tensions and conflicts. Other pieces were more formal and intuitive in the process of being made. Almost all of them were concerned with various distortions of a temporal grid and the displacement of an ur-pulse as well as experiments in harmony, reverberation, a kind of amateur and experimental approach to counterpoint, timbre, noise, drones and microtonality. There was also a fair amount of playful exploration and making decisions based on feeling alone.

Other influences on this material have been the growing sense that many of us may not have much of a future, or at least not the future we might have thought we had when we were young, and possibly the future our parents told us we might have. The threat of climate change, economic collapse, fascism and other horrors also haunts this work, as well as more personal anxieties and forms of depression, and the bittersweet flavour of nostalgia.

Available on cassette and as a download from Collapsed Structures:

collapsedstructures.bandcamp.com/album/eschatology


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Tiny Mix Tapes review:

I’m an optimist.

So when I listen to something like Ross Birdwise’s Eschatology (Collapsed Structures), I have to wonder how many others like me are out there. See, Birdwise the electronic manipulator of sonic moods seems to have a “growing sense that many of us may not have much of a future, or at least not the future we might have thought we had when we were young.” I don’t know about you, but I have a mortgage, a 401k, and a sense that what I’m doing is productive and sustainable, such as eating right and recycling. I’m also a jogger.

I focus on what I can focus on, right? I can’t take the weight of the entire world on my shoulders. But because I’m an optimist, I’m eternally pushing toward the goal of a future not envisioned by Ross Birdwise. If I was absorbed by “eschatology” — contemplating the events directly leading to the end of mankind, death, judgment, etc., like the rapture, which is totally going to happen but which I don’t have to worry about, of course — I’d probably be a lot more freaked out right now.

Still, Eschatology, ahem, “enraptures” me, and I find myself caught up in its composition, its DNA. Regardless of its intentions, its attempt to “evoke desolate spaces, times, tensions, and conflicts,” I can get into it, its ideas, its motifs. Even something as disorienting and foreboding as “Lopsided Soundtrack for the End Times” has its own tangential beauty. The chilly fractals of “Dawn of a New Ice Age” have me reaching for my warmest parka. The metallic jags of “Multiple, in Tension, Marching” crackle regally. The decay and ruin of “Eschatology” are breathtaking in their emptiness.

I think I’m won over.

With decay and ruin.

…I’m an optimist, dammit!

www.tinymixtapes.com/chocolate-grinder/listen-ross-birdwise-eschatology


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Sunbleach review:

Collapsed Structures is a semi-new label that’s run out of British Columbia, Canada. It focuses on “post-industrial” music, which generally comprises experimental ambient music and artists who combine retro-aesthetics with futurist music. Eschatology (which refers to religious study of end-of-the-world scenarios) by Ross Birdwise is a new full-length album of experimental ambient that features multiple short tracks bookended by single-length (three/four minutes) synthesizer jammers. It is a compilation of music that was recorded between 2012 and 2017. Choice track is “Heap”. The album is available for $4 CAD as a digital download and for $10 CAD on cassette in an edition of twenty.

sunbleach.net/2018/09/16/collapsed-structures-releases-eschatology-by-ross-birdwise/