Here be the final drone / hypnogogic statement from Taiga Remains. The man behind Taiga Remains has now shelved this moniker; but he’s far from hanging up his hat, as he now works under his given name Alex Cobb – also known as the philosopher king who benevolently reigns over his Students Of Decay. There are those at the Agency who can claim to speak with the poetics of corrosion, and we have long admired the sympathetic aesthetic in Cobb’s gorgeously elegant compositions for guitar, bells, tape hiss, and whatnot. A sadness of things hangs in the air for Cobb’s suspended mantras as these pieces evolve through a state of perpetual (un)becoming. For Cobb, the decaying sound is a steady dissolution of one chromatically rippling pattern into another which in turn diffuses into another and the cycle continues; but for every slippery note that pools into watery aquifers, Cobb distances himself from discursive and didactic languages that affix specific meanings onto work. He prefers a mystery and an ambiguousness to hang upon his crepuscular minimalism where the audience can entertain guided excursions of subjective thought. For us, these radiant guitar drones flecked with impressionist melodies bath in the snow of a thousand radios placed throughout Easter Island offering forth their eerie, luminous and beautiful sound that floats amongst those stoic heads that gaze beyond the horizon of the pacific ocean towards infinity, or oblivion if you prefer a more sublime reading. As the title to the album states, this album originally published in small cassette editions, long out of print. The material has been gloriously mastered for vinyl by James Plotkin.
Those with an ear for Andrew Chalk, William Basinski and those long-form passages from Natural Snow Buildings will find much to celebrate in Taiga Remains.