Giant Skeletons:
Warden of the Humming Skies
Giant Skeletons
The final chapter in Giant Skeletons' ‘Music of water, wood & bones' trilogy, Warden of the Humming Skies is a fitting partner to Nico Walser's earlier volumes. The Engelskirchen, Germany-based sound alchemist again lets his music do the talking, the release arriving sans any info whatsoever about production methodology and instrumentation, Walser perhaps not wanting the immediacy of the material and its reception to be clouded by extraneous detail; for what it's worth, the genre designation ‘post-ev'rything' does appear on his Bandcamp page, and though the label might be for some frustratingly vague it actually gets to the heart of a music that refuses to be pigeonholed.
No matter: Warden of the Humming Skies is as wonderfully Lovecraftian and memorable as the first two installments. It surprises immediately by opening with a rather conventional (for Walser) slice of punchy post-rock called “The Humming Skies.” It doesn't take long, though, for that signature Giant Skeletons sensibility to assert itself, which it does in the flirtations with New Age that emerge in the subsequent “Echoes of Absent Cosmonauts,” Walser positioning fretless bass at the forefront like some reincarnated Pastorius. Typical for an extended Walser production, the piece progresses through multiple parts, in this case advancing from one dominated by warbling synthesizers and ambient washes to another that can't help but suggest a nod to the intro of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” in its blend of keyboard textures and electric guitar.
The prog dimension present in the project's earlier chapters arises on this one too in the mellotron details that sometimes surface. Though I could be mistaken, the flute-like timbres in “Beyond the Ruins” and “Last Day of the Dreaming Navigator” sound suspiciously mellotron-generated. The latter piece also suggests Walser's not afraid to let a prettier side of his music come out, with in this instance a sound design centering on piano, acoustic guitar, and electric keyboards cultivating a gentle, New Age-styled ambiance. Pushing past seventeen minutes, the concluding “When Darkness Falls, the Photons Are Whispering” is naturally the set's major achievement and wends its ways patiently through a number of sequences, from peaceful meditative parts and cryptic prog interludes to vibrant waltz samplings and Mike Oldfield-styled guitar soloing.
A narrative of sorts is intimated by the six track titles, but no one need become too obsessed with delineating it: Warden of the Humming Skies hardly requires a backstory when it's already engrossing on purely listening terms. With the trilogy completed, the focus now shifts to wondering what's next for Walser and Giant Skeletons. Time'll no doubt tell.November 2019