Giant Skeletons: Guide to the Sunken Citadel
Giant Skeletons

Nico Walser continues his “Music of Water, Wood & Bones” trilogy with the second installment, Guide to the Sunken Citadel. Much like he did with the first chapter, Ghosts of Forsaken Ships, the Engelskirchen, Germany-based sound alchemist largely lets his music do the talking, with no more than genre tags—post-classical, kosmische, electro-acoustic, ambient, and progressive electronic the ones listed—provided to lend meaning to the project. Which is perfectly all right, by the way, when the material in question already offers ample food for thought. The early nineteenth-century cover illustration is itself a tip-off to the musical content, which oozes a classic sci-fi adventure (not horror) quality. In a project whose spirit is more redolent of Wells and Verne than Lovecraft, Walser's affection for ‘70s prog comes through loud and clear, though it's hardly the only style explored on the forty-one-minute release.

That he's got a trickster side is evident when “Frozen Robotina” introduces the set with melancholy solo piano musings, the suggestion made that perhaps the entire album will be devoted to elegant, neo-classical piano works. About a minute-and-a-half into the piece, however, a wordless choir enters and the music takes a quick left turn into abstract territory, with field recordings, alien vocalizations, mellotron figures, and synthesizer sequencer patterns conjuring the image of some fantastical, enigmatic paradise. As fragmented on paper as such a description might seem, Walser demonstrates a careful hand in the way he assembles the pieces into a coherent if episodic design.

Each of the other five pieces is similarly adventurous and unpredictable. “Alluvial Land” first establishes itself as a geophysical exploration until the calm is shattered by echoing rimshots and a piano-and-synthesizer sequence before a radiant shuffle-techno groove takes the track out. “Giant Skeletons” plays like some weird, prog-styled riff on Western twang, powered as it is by an epic riff, while “The Enemy Below” blends dulcimer, vibraphone, erhu, and synthesizers into a pulsating dynamo as if it's the most natural thing in the world. And just as the earlier album's “Diving Into a Snow Wave” hinted at a Mike Oldfield influence, so too does the semi-pastoral “The Deconstruction of Time” play like a similar homage, Walser no doubt fully aware of how much his guitar sound resembles that of his legendary precursor (and Robert Fripp's, too, for that matter).

December 2018