ISAN

Meet Next Life

Morr

It is hard to say exactly what the most disconcerting thing about Thomas Morr’s fancifully cool record label is. Is it that much of the music could be construed as new age, or that music that might be construed as new age could be enjoyable?

Brian Eno and his ambient contemporaries have always straddled the line between Erik Satie delicacy and Tolkienian Enya wankery. ISAN, or Integrated Services Analogue Network (a pun on the ISDN modem technology), have been one of the signature acts on Morr Music since their signature “Salamander” LP debuted in 1999. Primarily having dealt in muted, minimalist synths of the analogue variety (as their name might suggest), ISAN now radically becomes the one-millionth indie band to throw a glockenspiel and acoustic guitar into the mix.

ISAN have always aimed their synthocidal musings more toward adjusting the recliner than tugging the heartstrings. The album “armchair techno” redefined what Satie meant by “furniture music,” that aging hipster on the cover of Warp Magazine’s “Artificial Intelligence,” with his token joint and Pink Floyd jacket cover, got out of his chair and got maniacally abstract with his music. Reactionaries like ISAN toned it way down and began to once again pursue warm new wave and delicately precocious melodic minimalism in place of the growing trends in logic-defying drill n’ bass and Autechre obscurism. Their breathtaking meditation on Seefeel’s “When Face Was Face,” definitely a low-end trophy amassed by performing atop the original vinyl, put them in the league of the gigantic aesthetes they had longed to become a part of.

“Meet Next Life” does not gaze so high, though its head seems to be constantly in the stars. As any pontificating midnight stroller can tell you, this often results in a few missteps. The glistening sweetness on “Meet Next Life” can at times suffocate the listener with its saccharine dew. The very title suggests “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” extended to its 63-minute totality for the Martian gardens. Some tracks like the “The Race to Be First Home” are so clout with preciousness that can detract one’s attention from the better material that’s found here. Not surprisingly, it’s the tracks in which acoustic instruments dominate that refocus attention from blissful synthetic escapism to new age pandering.

ISAN does handle the sugary sentimentality better than, say, Moby for example. Close synthpop peer Skanfrom’s recent album title “Soothing Sounds for Robot” riffed off Raymond Scott’s “Soothing Sounds for Baby,” but ISAN’s latest may be more deserving of the title. The entire album reads like Scott’s “Sleepy Time” for insomniac machinery, “Lost in Translation” for skipping androids.

There’s “Iron Eyes,” the obligatory vocoder track, a lighter-than air tin-soldier glitch-march behind the child-like chimes of “One Man Abandon.” And while the album may often times more closely resemble Jan Hammer than Harold Budd (not that there’s anything wrong with that), “Meet Next Life” is filled with such cozy and encapsulating textures that, as is the case on most of the 4 a.m. Morr albums, it hardly seems to matter.

“Gunnera” floats in with rising strings and shuffling cymbals like Eno’s “The Big Ship” before sifting ashore with tides of astral sine waves and idyllic, atmospheric motorized hums. Like each of the 12 tracks included on ISAN’s eighth full length, there’s a hazy, blunted softness shielding on “Gunnera” that grants the song a buoyant dreaminess. Call it smart production on the part of ISAN duo Robin Saville and Antony Ryan if you will, but the ethereal wall of reverberation may also be what accounts for the superficiality one senses in the too-tender new agey moments.

Maybe it’s unfair to pin the battle of orks versus robots entirely on ISAN. As stated above, there are plenty of patches of wonderfully iridescent sonic embroidery to lose oneself in. It’s a matter of entrancing oneself in the harmonic singularity of each glistening pattern without allowing the traumatic distance between the presently compromised self and that haunting memory of innocence to become too distracting.

ISAN’s “Meet Next Life” is not their best work, nor their most original. Instead, it simply exists out in the nebulous region of the audio space time continuum, able to be properly experienced at the post-midnight hours of a cloudless evening while walking headphoned, neck-bent upward, enraptured with the joy of being between punctuated points of cataclysm, and assured that, if nothing else, there will always be next life.