‘Dark ambient’ is what Ben Powell calls the soundscapes he creates as Llyn Y Cwn*. He fuses field recording with electronics to interpret the often bleak but beautiful Welsh landscape that he draws inspiration from. His new album Megaliths is a sublimation of years of recording the environmental sound around stone circles. These have been woven into elongated washes of synthesised empathy that evolve and open up over the course of the album.
Recently Llyn Y Cwn performed at the Sound Sensitivity Program night at Bristol’s Café Kino where Ben performed tracks from the Megaliths alongside his transfixing visuals (see the visualiser below). I contacted Ben about the music afterwards and he gave me this quote: “The album is based on field recordings made at various megalithic sites, I started visiting these sites about 25 years ago and spend most of my holidays travelling the country in my campervan “bagging” stone circles. I’ve tried to recreate the atmosphere / environment / feeling of each site in the tracks, the sounds found on site dictated the feeling of the music; drops of water inside a burial chamber become percussive loops, crows, cows, wind and damselflies become drones, even overhead aircraft were utilised. I recorded impulse responses at burial chambers and used convolution reverb to replicate the ambience of the sites.” It also takes inspiration from Julian Cope’s “The Modern Antiquarian” and Aurbrey Burl’s “A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain“.
It’s hard to rush through, or cherry pick, from this album without breaking the spell it casts as a whole. If you have the time to listen in full then you will find yourself drawn in and becoming aligned with Llyn Y Cwn’s sensitivity for the places he has visited. There are tracks like ‘Pentre Ifan’ which merges swells of ductile synth harmonies with the bleating of sheep and birdsong, or ‘Bryn Celli Ddu’ where there is a subtle beat that seems teased out of the buffeting of the wind. The delicate way Ben Powell guides the evolving sounds through their subtle shifts is wondrous.
Layered drone sounds serve many purposes; sometimes they seem to capture the song of the stones as if the collection of rocks is performing its own plainsong, while at other times these slowly evolving resonant murmurs feel like the surrounding land responding to these megalithic circles. You can feel both the breadth of the landscape and the focused other-worldly aura these places create.
This is not pop music that must hook you in with the first ten seconds, this is an audio experience that shapes, enhances and transforms mood and perception. Megaliths, and all Llyn Y Cwn’s releases, are exemplars of ambient sound and every bit as breath-taking as the landscapes that inspired them.
Llyn Y Cwn socials: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram
Cold Spring Records: Website | Facebook | X (Twitter) | Instagram | Bandcamp
*Llyn Y Cwn (Welsh tr. lake of the dogs) is a small lake at 715m in the Glyder mountain range of Snowdonia, North Wales.
Review by Paul F Cook
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