Blackletter Litany, the first full-length by Aisle of Diffuse Sound (the solo project of Hector Udall, also of Brutus Greenshield and Aimcrier Tapes), is an expression of the indestructibility of knowledge. Comprised largely of samples from the last millenium of music, blurred together by shadowy drones and stabs of noise, the album in its very existence typifies the unique position of the digital-age archivist, the ability to look back upon—even inhabit—the distant past through fragments shored against the splintered consciousness of our modern day. The mood, and many of Udall’s carefully selected samples, is medieval; in the looping of its choirs and church organ fugues, we can hear the circuitous perpetuation, then fading, of an austere and pious Dark Age mode of life. Udall’s production mimics the ticking of history, degrading and recontextualizing these sounds with new ones, like yellowing hardcovers on a library shelf. The album’s unseen “Eternal Copyist” collects knowledge across media; Udall’s passions for the film, literature, and art of the past are evident in the album’s widescreen grandeur and historical reflexivity. Thematics aside, Blackletter Litany’s thrilling sonic contrasts help it rise above staid dark-ambient tropes; the gleaming dulcimer in “Rushlight Dirge,” the clattering jazzy drums of “Triforium,” the delightfully apt sound of soft turning book pages that underpins the album. Enveloping yet dynamic, unclassifiable yet seeming to have existed forever, Blackletter Litany is an ambient patchwork that speaks directly to the joy of accumulation, of bringing the unremembered past to light.
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