Vessels to Motherland – Queen City Sounds and Art

Vessels to Motherland, photo courtesy the artists

Vessels to Motherland released its latest album LIVE IN BROOKLYN on February 3, 2023. Rather than a traditional live album as the title might suggest it’s an attempt to convey a journey across roughly an hour in familiar places but focusing on elements we sense but often tune out. It is the inverse of the way some ambient albums are conceived in drawing out attention to these environmental details. Each track is an anagram of “anomaly” excepting the closing track with that exact title. The opening song “ymnoala” pairs the sound of a space mission with echoing metallic string sounds, what sounds like coils being bowed at times, a ratchety noise maker, lonely synth drones resonating through an open space, nearly chaotic zither sent through natural reverb. It’s all both otherworldly and intimately familiar like the soundtrack to an industrial part of town at night with mysterious activity going on around you unseen but heard and felt. And the rest of the album is a similarly abstract yet tactile vein. Listen to “ymnoala” on Spotify and follow Vessels to Motherland at the links below.

Vessels to Motherland on Facebook

Vessels to Motherland on YouTube

Vessels to Motherland on Instagram

vesselstomotherland.com

Vessels to Motherland tap into a similar creative and sonic space as Art of Noise did in the 80s with a pure blend of archaic, textural sounds and modern electronic and avant-garde aesthetics. With its track “shenandora,” Vessels to Motherland created what sounds like a dialogue, a play written for cybernetic organisms in their natural mode of communication. Percussive sounds establish patterns and electronic tones weave intricate call and response dynamics that by the end of the song sounds a bit like foreboding dance music that dissolves into calm, repeating resonances that pulse with the satiation that intelligences that do not suffer the limitations of analog, organic life and its cycle of processes into which fatigue and sleep are built. Yet machines and digital existences too must update, repair and replenish in the face of the variations of stimulus to their own environment just like us humans. Vessels to Motherland brilliantly gives expression to that very concept without a single word spoken or sung in the song with a title that suggests an individual name whether of a consciousness or a place or a collective, a corporate entity, which adds yet another dimension to the level of creative work going on with the song. Listen to “shenandora” on Soundcloud, follow Vessels to Motherland at the links below and look out for the NYC-based duo’s full length album Machine Lieder set for release in 2022.