Barn Owl - Ancestral Star
- Written by Antonio Tzikas
Ancestral Star is the new album from San Francisco drone outfit Barn Owl, and this solely instrumental record is a step outside the musical box most of us inhabit - there are no hooks, riffs or catchy melodies here. Barn Owl capture the sound of nightfall on a barren desert, the light from a single candle in a deep and hollow cave network, sunrise on a city before the daily cattle run begins and the calm after the storm; they bring you peace.
Admittedly, this isn’t going to be many peoples cup of tea - the very nature of the music requires a solitary listen, one’s full attention and the mind must be channelled into the sound to fully appreciate it. It’s not one to be listened to whilst getting ready to go out nor will it feature on any party playlists, but it does provide the perfect introspective soundtrack to the inner mind and can will you away to wherever it pleases.
The music itself ranges from heavy dark guitar drone to more traditional sounding drone instruments, playing to the ‘Ancestral‘ part of the albums title - ‘Flatlands‘ for example uses Celtic instruments and mystic chanting and could be on the Braveheart soundtrack, or at least conjures up an image of 12th Century Scotland and dark misty highlands. Elsewhere, pieces like title track ‘Ancestral Star‘ and ‘Sundown’ really do sound otherworldly with their use of heavily distorted, feedback drenched guitar drones that can’t be recognised as being based on anything that’s gone before, apart from maybe darkness itself, or its impending threat.
It’s actually surprising just how involving a piece of single chord drone can be, this music does away with any type of rhythm, riffs, lyrics, chords changes, vocals, beats or bassline. So what’s left then I hear you cry? Well, what’s left is the purest form of expression and music once you strip away all the above-mentioned conventions of what is expected of a piece of music. This is more sonic art with a bit of traditional drone and historic reference mixed in than a record of ‘songs‘, even though most are of usual song length and aren’t so incredibly abstract or discordant that they are automatically filed away as art music rather than popular music.
This record really is one for laying back and zoning out to - there’s not much else you can do to it but be either hypnotised or bored stiff depending on where you stand on this kind of thing and if you ‘get it’. I got it, or rather, it got me. One of the more interesting things you’ll hear this year.