V.VECKER ENSEMBLE “Coastal Depression” C40 (NoiseAgonyMayhem)


Kosmische never sounded so British Columbian.

Well wait, I guess that’s not totally true. Kosmische is kosmische, at home in a planetarium or black-lit dorm room from Vancouver to Vladivostok, or even, uh, Dar es Salaam. Point is, if you got that spacey kraut-inspired drone going on, you can be sure there’ll be a bunch of kooks ready to listen to it. Kooks who are more interested in stargazing and internal contemplation than anything else. Kooks that have enough time on their hands to really let this kind of tunage wash over them. Kooks like, well, me.

So why “British Columbian”? The ensemble, here a trio of V.Vecker, David Rogers, and Luke Rogers, hails from Vancouver, and Coastal Depression places the proceedings and the worldview firmly in that locale. “Suspended and caught between ocean, islands, mountain ranges and borders[, it] is a heavy place.” The ensemble therefore attempts to capture this “heaviness” through droning guitar, synthesizers, and saxophone, letting the weight of the notes and the length of their passing stand in for the at-times-odd and at-other-times-overwhelming sense of BC stasis. There’s nothing like a thick, syrupy synth stab to punctuate a weighty stasis.

What’s great about Coastal Depression is that it can stand in for that kind of stasis, that kind of hovering inert midpoint felt by anyone stuck anywhere. It pulses a universal kind of rippling energy, vast and spacious, enveloping easily or slowly making itself known until it’s all you know anymore. Actually, whether it’s subtle or direct, it’s going to grab your attention in one way or another until, sadly, it suddenly ends, and you realize what you’re missing.



--Ryan