400 Lonely Things - Children of Eidolon

For Children of Eidolon, esteemed sound artist Lawrence English has curated a selection of tracks from 400 Lonely Things, capturing the elusiveness that permeates their unique music. It is a transitional sound of melancholic ambient music, sitting on the threshold between drone and melody, haunted by the ghosts of the past. This sense of elusiveness is also reflected in the image on the cover of Children of Eidolon - a monochrome photograph of three Depression-era children staring out and beyond us into something unknown. It's an image stumbled upon and used by Craig Varian when he sent a playlist of unreleased tracks to the Room40 supremo, whose keen ear for detecting affective and unusual sounds lurking beneath the surface uncovered a thread woven throughout this selection.

Eidolon, itself, in Greek mythology refers to "a spirit-image of a living or dead person; a shade or phantom look-alike of the human form". So perhaps this curated collection could be considered a spirit-image, a phantom 400 Lonely Things album, set apart and distinct from the recent conceptual and thematic albums composed by Craig Varian for 400 Lonely Things.

The opening track, 'Frailer Torn', returns to a backwoods country setting, which shares space with the decaying psychedelic mansion - a haven for artists and outsiders that provided the genius loci for their stunning Mother Moon album. The track features rustling sounds, birds chirping, and sombre light atmospherics. It's laced with a woozy, mischievous vocal hum and laboured breathing effects, creating not so much a scary effect, but rather, like much of 400 Lonely Things' material, a sense of something foreboding and lurking.

The music of 400 Lonely Things haunts and calls us with its uneasy atmospherics composed of sample based textures, drone and melody. A half-remembered melody flickers through the degraded loops of 'Mute Elation', its hypnotic spell broken by unexpected cuts as it slips into wavering, shadowy drones, so slight at times they becomes almost elusive. The brooding drone of 'Many Ran' unfolds into distant mysterious utterances - spirit voices pulled from the ether - slowly unfurling to the tinkle of ghostly piano notes, surrounded by a scatter of scratches and screechy tones. The entire track aches with nostalgia, as if it has tapped into the past. Meanwhile, the slow weathered gestating ululations of 'Life Minus' are populated by blurred skewed laughter, and the chatter of phantom figures, carried on patterns of lighter synth layers that edge forward through eroding, grainy textures. For those already familiar with 400 Lonely Things consider this a mutant counterpart piece to 'Life Plus' from The New Twilight.

'Cloud Bringing', the closing track here, features some of the dreamiest material I have heard from 400 Lonely Things. Swelling from gentle, billowing waves of synth it hangs in the air waiting to be heard, felt and perhaps understood before drfting into a hypnotic dreamspace and dissolving into something vague and formless. As if, like the children on the cover - and all of us in years to come - we were never there at all.

Children of Eidolon is dedicated to William Basinski, the experimental composer whose work is also inextricably linked to memory and time, who brought 400 Lonely Things to the attention of Lawrence English. Recorded between 2008 and 2024, these songs were originally intended for different albums, some completed others nearly finished, but here they flow seamlessly with Lawrence English drawing out a fresh appreciation of their textured, nostalgic, and melancholic ambience. This is music which calls to you, waiting for you to reach out and experience it in your own way. 400 Lonely Things have tapped into something special. Let it do for you what it did for me. Recommended. Children of Eidolon is available digitally from Room40 Bandcamp