Kranky is set to release ambient veteran Loscil’s eleventh studio album, Monument Builders, on November 11. The album will follow 2014’s Sea Islands, a hypnotic piece of “self-erasing ambience,” whose TMT review you can read here.
For Monument Builders, Loscil (real name Scott Morgan) was inspired by the experimental film Koyaanisqatsi and its Philip Glass-penned score. Composed “during a period in which the life-and-death battles of close friends and family forced Morgan to examine his own feelings on mortality,” the album also picks up on the anti-humanist philosophy of John Gray and Edward Burtynsky’s famed aerial photography of the degeneration of human environment.
“Gray’s writing, particularly his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, reinforced a bleak notion I had that we humans don’t have much say in how it all turns out,” says Morgan in the press release. “With Burtynsky, I was struck by the fact that something so strikingly beautiful could be the result of large-scale waste and exploitation.”
Listen to the title track from the album below:
Monument Builders tracklisting:
01. Drained Lake
02. Red Tide
03. Monument Builders
04. Straw Dogs
05. Deceiver
06. Anthropocene
07. Weeds