2) Below Sea Level - Simon Scott (TOP 20 OF 2012)

Below Sea Level

Simon Scott

12k Records.

Original SCQ Review.

Last year’s Top 20 Albums list played out over a mountainous event in my personal life – the uphill anticipation and aftermath serenity bookmarking my September wedding – and, as such, the event informed the criteria of several top listens. Although bringing far less intensity, 2012’s big event – my moving away from Ottawa – still left lingering traces over the year in music, classifying records in old or new geographies.

Since no record on SCQ’s year-end list approaches the investment Below Sea Level has in geography, it’s fitting that Simon Scott’s ode to The Fens in Eastern England so prominently scored my Ottawa farewell. Early spins of this record, occurring about a month from our packing-up and departure, encapsulated my last weeks of walking to work, taking in the sun-drenched parks and sidewalks of a town unknowingly on the cusp of a drought, while hearing the insects, birds and plant-life resident to an area thousands of kilometers away. Sometimes Scott manipulates the found-sounds into electronic rhythms that form the bedrock of his ambient movements, other times he lets the various organic sounds collaborate with his tones as they like, improvised. But when Scott fully confesses his love of the Fens through nostalgic guitar-work, it speaks to attachments we can hardly enunciate – the places we’ve left pieces of ourselves. 

Below Sea Level - Simon Scott (SUMMER ALBUMS 2012)

Below Sea Level

Simon Scott

12K Records.

SCQ Rating: 80%

Simon Scott’s first release on the 12K imprint deserves mention firstly for being his most personal. Below Sea Level is the culmination of two years the former Slowdive drummer spent visiting the Fens marshland in eastern England – a spot both agriculturally controversial and sentimental to Scott’s childhood – to track field recordings and expose the musicality of his memories. The results lay as the backbone to these seven tracks, over which Scott blurred guitar and synthesizer, in real time, during his stays there.

As well as representing Scott’s childhood and ancestral ties, Below Sea Level proves a remarkable merger of purely organic soundscapes and leftfield electronics; in short, because it’s often difficult to dissect which is which. Tracks two and three (note: each track is numerical as sequenced) bleed like reedy drones under the wavering of looping harmonics and swathes of digital backwash. But just as often, Scott steps back from the ambient tussle and lets the landscape speak back in birdcalls, amphibian croaks, water ripples, and nearby machinery. The reality of Scott’s location causes a virtual standstill during track four, overwhelming any traditional song-form, whereas it weaves a bubbling catharsis into track seven’s celestial electronics. Best yet are the tracks where Scott fingerpicks some guitar into the aural scenery, providing bucolic timbres of psychedelia that are simple but inspiring.

To those few listeners aware of the territory’s conflicted history, Below Sea Level will likely plumb deeper emotional depths but even oblivious fans should ascribe to the record’s stark and seasonal affinity. In some cases, Scott seems to be playing for the present moment, merely coexisting with a complicated patch of nature. In its most satisfying moments, however, Below Sea Level sounds like a poignant farewell.