Lone’s “Lemurian” is music to make coffee to

by Scott Wilson

The first line of a poem or a novel or a speech is important, not just because it sets the mood or proves the author’s credibility or draws the audience in, but because it teaches the audience how to interpret the work. When Dickens writes, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” he’s saying that the world the reader is about to enter will be duplicitous; be on the lookout for different viewpoints. This rule of literature holds true for music as well. “Weird Al”, for instance, never starts an album off with a polka-pop remix; his first track is always a straight-up parody. He wants to ease the audience into his style, lay a foundation to build off of in the listener’s mind.

Lone takes a different, though no less successful, approach to the opening track on his second full-length album, Lemurian. He throws in everything he has: every trick, every aesthetic, every bit of iMac-fueled techno-voodoo into his first song, in a mishmash of sounds that resembles two RJD2 CDs being played simultaneously while your three-year-old niece controls the volume knob to the stereo: ramp in, ramp out, click, snap, beep. No, it’s not an ear-tickler, and I don’t believe Lone meant it to be. The first track is there to say that Lone does what Lone is going to do, and the listener needs to hold on or get off now.

Lone’s style isn’t breaking any rules phonically: he layers hip-hopish beats under simple melody loops with the occasional one-handed keyboard and vocal blurp thrown in to move things along. However, on a structural level, Lone gets weird. Those ramp-ins and ramp-outs of the first track make a comeback in later songs, but are subdued. The listener gets lulled in parts, as certain layers quiet down, then suddenly snap to attention when the beat comes back, loud and forceful. There’s also a lot of playing around with timing. The listener might be nodding away, half-paying attention, when suddenly one of the layers will skip, and fall behind the beat by a tick or two. Then there will be some chopping or some time-warping as the layers try to synch back up. Like with the ramping volume manipulation, Lone isn’t just messing with the music, he’s messing with the listener’s attention. Lemurian is an experiment in how to change the way we listen to music, how the act of playing through an album is experienced.

There are two levels that Lemurian can be enjoyed on. The first is that the whole album is easy to listen to; it’s soft and goes on well in the background of daily activities. On the other level, if you listen very hard, you can get into the time-warping and structural strangeness, and go on a musical journey, as they say. The problem is that Lone makes the listener work a little too hard to get to that second level. It’s a little like a long sigh in a hurricane.  The root of the issue – if there is an issue at all, which I could hear an argument for or against – is that it sounds too familiar. None of the tracks are so strong that the listener can say, definitively, that this is Lone, right here, this is the sound of Lone. There’s no signature. Should the sound be so distinct that it can be recognized from the open window of a car speeding by? Maybe, maybe not. This isn’t AC/DC, after all.  For soothing ambient noise, Lemurian is perfect; it would be uncouth to project too much want onto it.