Sound Words: James Vincent McMorrow's Post Tropical Pre Vention
“Slow etched glacial soul, carving the world into something sad”
Every summer my mom and I would join my cousins on a seasonal expedition to Lassen Volcanic National Park. We'd climb the peaks, explore lost hiking trails, and swim in pretty much every lake and stream that wasn't birthed from boiling sulfuric lava being loosed deep within the splitting pressurized crust of the earth.
Even in late August, summiting the peak of Lassen brought a full beltway of snow, standing up there in the crisp air making snow angels in our t-shirts and hiking shorts. Pelting each other with snowballs so loose packed they seemed to sheer themselves apart mid-flight and land as powder trails inches away from their intended targets. We never camped there in winter, but I always wondered what it would have looked like; not the mountains, since I understood their late-summer-snow-caps, but the other iconic sites: the ever-broiling hot springs, the reed buffeted meadow lakes, the information lodges morphed into winter chalets.
From all I can glean, James Vincent McMorrow's Post Tropical is basically that: the sound of winter come upon the most extreme climates.
The volcanic mountain regions buried under snow. The hot springs and thermal vents breathing like depressed keyboard blasts battling with the layer upon layer of white powder swirled background choral passages. Horns thrum like erupting geysers. The marshes freeze over, reeds coated in the twinkling of ice crystals made wind chimes for the cold in the breeze. The air all around is open and wanting, every breath fills it in, wisps of falsetto forming hushed and spidery like tendrils of mist crawling through the early morning.
The boiling fumaroles bubble up underneath the sweetly steaming snow. Their sulfuric scent broken in the frozen sky. Only the sound remains: the tapping echo of ice caps popping over the bubblers, crisp and sharp.
Slow etched glacial soul, carving the world into something sad and wondrously new. The landscape a survey in loss. Iron rich clay in which nothing grows. Mineral rich water which dissolves all but the most tenacious algae. The animals all disappeared to winter slumber dens coated in extra layers of fur and nestled deep in the soft dirt of the forest, under its own blanket. A wild emptied and undisturbed. Places haunted by stillness.
The transformed pain of the environment rakes you with familiar shivers until ultimately the sound reveals itself as the regrets of summer flash frozen into icy shards of memory. So beautiful to think about and so horrible to live through. But possible to visit with every spin of the record.
+ + +
