Vancouver’s electronic music community has been known to let its work reflect its surrounding environments. If anyone has been able to take the sea to sky nature of Vancity and channel it into an album, it’s Loscil.
Sitting somewhere between dub techno and ambient with a nicely reflected icing of post-rock sensibility, Scott Morgan has spent the last five years making music to be underwater to, or at least it feels like it most days. His is a synth and dub bass movement that idles along beautifully, as reminiscent of a summer day starting at the waters around Granville Island as it is a fall’s rain dropping on the window.
Scott’s latest record as Loscil, “Endless Falls,” continues this trend of aquatic wonder and also continues his slightly more tangible territory for those who may not be able to wrap their head around ambient. Scott frequently drums for Vancouver Indie legends Destroyer and has remixed the band to great effect in the past. So band leader and Vancouver’s unofficial poet-laureate Dan Bejar returns to favor with Loscil’s first vocal track, a tune called the making of grief point that would make the top 40 in another dimension.
It’s this kind of hybrid musical approach that defines in many ways where Vancouver music is going. Bands like Basketball sit on bills with dubstep DJs just as easily as they do at Indie rock shows. You Say Party, We Say Die looks like an your average Indie rock band until they break the kind of disco-punk breakdowns that could almost be an acid version of LCD Soundsystem. Even local industrial rockers Left Spine Down are pushing deeper into an almost unrecognizable form of electro-rock.
Vancouver as post-ambient-rock-bass haven for 2011? If things keep up, I’d think so.