During the Music Tapes show here in Chapel Hill/Carrboro last month, while we were outside playing the game around 1 a.m., an obviously-inebriated homeless man approached Julian and stunningly said what sounded like “Signal Morning” (and said nothing else). Julian repeated “Signal Morning?” The man mumbled the same thing. Julian questioned again, as what was transpiring dawned on those who had heard the words “Signal Morning” before. It was almost like he didn’t know what he was saying, but knew those two words had to be said. Naturally, Mat invited the man inside for the end of the show. I believe he enjoyed himself!
-Cloud Recordings message board post from wilson
This morning we remembered everything.
-Circulatory System
Once we took things for granted. Speaking for myself, I had just been exposed to Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume 1, the second full-length album by The Olivia Tremor Control, roundabout the time it was released. I eagerly sought out their first album, which, after a couple listens (it always takes a couple listens with the textured psychedelia of Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss), I thought was one of the greatest things I’d ever heard. I saw them live; I didn’t have enough cash to buy an Elephant 6 shirt or an LP; I thought, there’s always next time. I’d no idea the band had privately decided this was their farewell tour. A couple years later, many fans were a bit vexed that instead of a new Olivia Tremor Control album they had two separate projects to now consider: Will’s Circulatory System and Bill’s The Sunshine Fix, while OTC remained on “hiatus.” Yet concerns were diminished because at least the music kept flowing out of Athens. Circulatory System released not one record, but four: a collection of experimental recordings released on CD-Rs, and the event itself, an eponymous epic so densely layered that for some it took years before they could finally properly appreciate it, or at least digest it. The cover, which evoked that of OTC’s first album, implied that Will had not strayed far from his roots, but there was so much on the record that it was like an emptying of a back catalog, as George Harrison had done with All Things Must Pass. So much wealth. One spare track was handed out to a compilation album…and then Circulatory System vanished.
Well, OK, not quite. They performed live fairly consistently about Athens, enough so that fans could track who was currently in the lineup and who had just left. But rumors of a follow-up album, and another growing pile of recordings, kept many anxious. By 2006, very anxious, because Circulatory System’s second seemed right on the cusp of release: momentum seemed to finally be building. That September Justin Laird interviewed Derek Almstead (of Montreal, Elf Power), who had joined the band right after the release of the first record. He described what it meant to be assembling and polishing what had already accumulated:
When I joined the band Will was like “Okay, we gotta start working on this new record,” and he wanted me to help getting it going. He’s like, “I’ve got all these pieces and songs and things and I need help sifting through it. Can I give you some CDs to listen to?” I go over to his house one day and he hands me one half of a manila envelope that he’s painted and collaged–it’s a manila envelope cut in half, and there’s collages and paintings and little messages and thoughts, production ideas, all over this whole thing, and inside it there’s 20 CD-Rs. Each CD-R with art, collages, full of music on every single disc. I mean, there were a few things with like one song on a CD. And I’m just blown away, there’s so much stuff to listen to. I’m like, “Uh, I can’t–you want me to sift through this and pick out the best of this?” That’s a hard process. And a week later he’s like, “Oh, here’s 15 more discs.”
Keep in mind that Will had also been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Recently he opened up about how this affected his process (to Lucas Jensen for Aquarium Drunkard):
I mean, my mind…in the last 10 years I was, like, what’s the deal? I had all this stuff and I was excited, but a lot of things started changing. I couldn’t see out of my right eye. I was going blind, and I went to the doctor, and so I got the brain scan. And he said, “You’ve had it for ten years” and I said that makes sense. That makes sense. It had been sucking part of my creativity out. It’s like I’m trying, but if you don’t know that, you wonder what is going on.
But Will was starting to get some assistance. Not only was Derek Almstead helping him organize what he’d created, but Robert Schneider, savoring an Elephant 6 revival as he put together his own magnum opus, The Apples in Stereo’s New Magnetic Wonder, leapt into the jungle which would soon be called Signal Morning. Charlie Johnston of The 63 Crayons joined the band and got his hands dirty finalizing Signal Morning as well; but most surprisingly, a key player in tying up all the loose ends and finally kicking a finished album out the front door was a relative newcomer to the collective, Nesey Gallons, a young Elephant 6 fan who had been working closely with Julian Koster on his long-awaited second album, Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes (as well as The Singing Saw at Christmastime), and who had composed an absolutely gorgeous full-length of his own called Eyes & Eyes & Eyes Ago. Given the lengthy history of the album (which has at least one track which dates back to the early years of The Olivia Tremor Control), it should be no surprise that the final credits are a who’s-who of the Elephant 6 Recording Company: John Fernandes (OTC), Pete Erchick (Pipes You See, Pipes You Don’t, OTC), Heather McIntosh (The Instruments, Japancakes, Gnarls Barkley), Hannah Jones (Sound Houses), Suzanne Allison (Sound Houses), Julian Koster (The Music Tapes), Robbie Cucchiaro (The Music Tapes), Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel), Eric Harris (OTC, Elf Power), Gary Olson (The Ladybug Transistor), Andy Gonzales (Marshmallow Coast), Emily Growden (M Coast), Kelly Ruberto (elephant6.com!), Dave McDonnell (Bablicon, The Diminisher), and, yes, Bill Doss, who harmonizes with Will on the opening track, “Woodpecker Greeting Worker Ant”–just like the old days.
And it’s here! Emblazoned proudly with the Elephant 6 logo, decorated profusely with photos of Will’s house and his paintings, as well as drawings and photos by friends (most significantly the late Will Westbrook, to whom the album is dedicated), and given a cover which is uncluttered, a blue sky above angular clouds, one of Will’s most exquisite works and one which feels like a burst of fresh oxygen. Appropriate for an album which, for all its densely-layered collages, feels like standing atop a mountain and looking down upon the sky and below you. I suppose the instinct is to temper expectations, when so many message boards are whispering “album of the decade” (it leaked online late last spring). But, uh-huh, it’s good. Although Signal Morning picks up right where the last one left off, as though eight years had not passed, what’s most startling about the album is how straightforward and poppy the whole thing is. At 46:15, it’s short for a W. Cullen Hart album. There are no extended ambient time-fillers, which I always enjoyed (particularly Dusk at Cubist Castle’s, which lures you into a daydream before snapping you awake); there are no moments when one is meant to sit back and enjoy avant-garde tricks via headphones. No, this is a collection of songs first and foremost–at times rocking, but always urgent, as though the ideas, still murked-up in his familiar metaphoric language (alternating between nature-imagery and the cosmic), are not just abstract philosophy but a matter of life and death. The music thrives upon this rabid enthusiasm. So some might be disappointed that there is not a “drop acid now” moment–but this is psychedelic rock of the highest order. Will’s feet are still in the 60’s, his head still in the polygonal clouds.
Most of all it feels like a unified album, a concept album without the burden of a story and characters (other than “you” and ”the universe,” I suppose). The track sequencing, by Charlie Johnston and Nesey Gallons, is masterful, flowing from one song to the next with nary a breath, guiding you on a voyage through the latest inter-dimensional planes of Will’s conscious like sightseeing out the windows of the Flight to Ashiya. The sights are those sounds he conjurs, which always offer a contrast between fuzzy distortions and crystal-clear cello or clarinet, luring the melody (and Will’s sometimes smothered vocals) out of the haze. Over and over, this little trick works. A whispering voice, plaintive strings, and then a collision of noises and instruments, sending you down a rabbit-hole. Perhaps I’m abusing spatial metaphors because I’ve always been drawn to music which conjures a landscape, and sets you out exploring it. Will’s universe is a familiar one to fans, but there are nooks and crannies here you haven’t visited before.
“Round Again” manages to be both compelling as vaguely-menacing pop music while ironically underlining pop music’s expectations, “Only a Northern Song”-style: “If you need a little song/to help you move along/into the next verse or two or three/of course we’ll come round/we always come round again.” The pulsating “Blasting Through” is as animate as some cybernetic organism that honks, squeaks, drones, and vibrates, set to an unnerving percussive beat, and a chorus which alternates hiding in the foliage before lunging out at you with venomous fangs (headphones put your life at risk). But the quieter tracks can be spellbinding too: the veritably trembling “Gold Will Stay,” a heartbreaking melody sung plainly, with little adornment. Linking every track is that sonic fuzz, as if you’re struggling to keep this distant station through the static; perhaps that’s why the softer moments can be so heart-stopping. While the closing song, “Signal Morning,” doesn’t quite reach the heights of the closing numbers from the first two OTC albums, what makes it so fascinating is the way Will’s almost atonal singing and truly bizarre assembly of noises bump up against a soaring melody inherent and improbably conjured by all that wash of sound.
Yet it’s ”Overjoyed,” the first “single” from the album (that is, the one sent out to the blogosphere from the band’s publicists), which spells out Will’s manifesto: “Painting pictures, painting worlds/who’s to say that they’re not real?” This identification of creativity and imagination as a vital element to joy seems to be the Rosetta Stone to every other Circulatory System song–and surely creating music has been the most therapeutic way for Will to cope with MS. Suddenly the ideas don’t seem nearly so abstract, and that compelling quality to the album makes logical sense.
There’s talk that the unused CS material which had been building up in Will’s attic is being saved for the next record, which is to come out in a much shorter interval. At least in the short term the new material seems to be freely flowing: the upcoming vinyl release will come with a bonus LP featuring alternate mixes, similar to the Inside Views CD-R from 2001. It feels like golden days, a signal morning, and the whole sky is below you. This morning you’ll remember everything, and it will be as it once was. For a while.
Signal Morning,
by Circulatory System
1. Woodpecker Greeting Worker Ant
2. Rocks and Stones
3. This Morning (We Remembered Everything)
4. Tiny Concerts
5. Electronic Diversion
6. Overjoyed
7. The Breathing Universe
8. News from the Heavenly Loom
9. Round Again
10. I, You, We
11. Blasting Through
12. Particle Parades
13. Gold Will Stay
14. The Frozen Lake/The Symmetry
15. Until Moon Medium Hears the Message
16. (Drifts)
17. Signal Morning
