BILL LASWELL

City of Light

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Colour LP

Boomkat Product Review:

NYC’s prolific fusion-music legend Laswell meets Coil and Tetsu Inoue on his 6th studio album, produced at a pinnacle of the illbient dub sound and highly recommend to disciples of Jon Hassell, Kevin Martin, Muslimgauze, Tzadik Records

Replete with liner notes by Hakim Bey, and recorded between Banaras, India, and Brooklyn, ‘City of Light’ is a highlight of Laswell’s unfathomable catalogue of solo and collaborative works since the late ‘70s. Suspended in the aether somewhere amid dark ambient, drone, 4th world fusion, and dub musick - or what was simply summed as “illbient” at the time - the album can be heard to loosely echo Jon Hassell’s ‘City: Works of Fiction’ album from a decade prior, while resonating the psychedelic pressure of the whole ‘Macro Dub Infection’ sound limned by Kevin Martin’s influential, contemporaneous compilations. It also shares a fascination with subcontinental music’s that links it both to explorations of alternate tunings by pioneering ‘60s minimalists with alternate tunings, and likewise the rhythms and sounds of Muslimgauze, who would remix Laswell over the years.

More than a quarter century after its release, ‘City of Light’ feels very much of its era, but also in its own temporal, uchronic slipstream where timelines bend like light into a place without time. Laws sets the tone with ‘Nothing’, terraforming rich atmospheric conditions for Lori Carson’s narration and Trilok Gurtu’s ricocheting tabla, where ‘Kála’ follows with Coil’s Peter Christopherson and John Balance lending “sound collage” and eerie string colours to its iridescent wormhole dynamic. Chasing his and Laswell’s ’95 LP ‘Cymatic Scan’, (and a hook-up with Jonah Sharp) Japan’s Tetsu Inoue chimes in to the elliptical, harmonious drone arc of ‘Kashi’, and the set shores up in rugged illbient, proper, with the buckling dub ballast of ‘Above the Earth’ acting as augur for the dread darkness that befell electronic music from ’97 onwards.

Colour LP (4)