“Candling” by Loscil

The cover artwork for Loscil’s Lake Fire — a black-and-white image of a forest all but hidden by dense fog — is the perfect visual metaphor for a song like “Candling.” During its opening minutes, the song’s surface consists of thick, nigh-impenetrable slabs of Gaussian blurred noise. Beneath that surface, however, one can just make out faint piano melodies and clattering rhythmic elements which, as the song unfolds, grow increasingly distinct and present.

It’s a rather simple effect, but one that’s consistently beguiling. Much like the rest of Lake Fire, “Candling” feels like a glimpse of a world that lurks just behind the world of our five senses, a sort of sonic “thin place” like the those that almost certainly exist in the depths of dark, fog-enshrouded mountain forests.

Lake Fire is currently available from Kranky Records.