“A full strength curse hurled back at the built world.”
A-Sun Amissa are a proudly underground experimental outfit. Centred around multi-instrumentalist Richard Knox, the group has carved out a niche that overlaps with the ambient, drone, doom and post-rock realms. It’s a combination that allows for incredible versatility: from the moody soundscapes of 2020’s Black Rain (I) all the way to 2024’s sweeping, majestic Ruins Era.
A-Sun Amissa’s latest release sees the group expanding into new territory in the form of a collaborative album with Lauren Mason (formerly of Torpor). Waterscores is an album marrying A-Sun Amissa’s soundscapes with Mason’s poetry.
Finding the balance between spoken word and music is tricky. Often, it feels like spoken word samples are an afterthought – something to fill an otherwise uninteresting space. When spoken word is allowed to hog the limelight, it can – at worst – feel like the listener is being subjected to self-important whining with some beats in the background. (Figuring out the particular album implied by this statement is an exercise left for the reader.)
On Waterscores, the interplay between the music and spoken word shows a maturity of compositional skills and a refreshing lack of ego. A-Sun Amissa’s ambient-drone experimentation is on fine form, with long, distant howling sounds building dread and unease. The soundscapes ebb and flow, build and subside and take the listener on a journey. And importantly, Mason’s poetry is an integral part of the experience. The music is not merely an accompaniment to her words, nor are the words there to fill quieter moments as the musicians play around with their effects pedals.
Waterscores is a single, thirty eight minute track, in which A-Sun Amissa and Lauren Mason invite us to reflect on our collective horror, and also our collective complicity, in environmental destruction (especially of the oceans). Mason’s words touch on ideas that will be familiar to anyone who has read the news: oil spills, plastic pollution, algal blooms. These are not weird or alarming ideas – but they should be. And the marriage of Mason’s words with A-Sun Amissa’s music creates soundscapes that invite us to consider this damage we have wrought.
It was initially tempting to try breaking Waterscores down into a series of movements… “the section that gradually builds”, “the section with squealing clarinet”, and so on. What is surprising about this record is that, yes, you can find those kinds of sections on this album. But the real standout moments are when things get quiet. Really quiet. A-Sun Amissa and Lauren Mason have taken the traditional weak point of noise-drone albums – the extended fadeout – and turned them into beautiful, fizzling, fading moments for contemplation.
It’s always exciting when collaborations push artists out of their comfort zones and when they represent true acts of collaboration. Waterscores is a unique, reflective album that draws in the listener in unexpected ways.
8/10
Waterscores releases on the 27th February through Gizeh Records and can be pre-ordered here.