Bradley Sean Alexander: Cascade
Pyramid Blood
One-half of North Atlantic Drift, Bradley Sean Alexander typically releases his solo material under the anthéne name on his own Polar Seas Recordings imprint. So what's Cascade doing on Pyramid Blood? According to Alexander, the material's slightly different feel and its occasional orchestral moment suggested it might be better to issue it under his birth name on another label. However, admirers of his anthéne recordings won't find too great a difference between Cascade and the many Polar Seas sets he's issued using the alias, and, most critically, neither will that likely be cause for complaint.
Pitched as “ethereal songs for fleeting liminal states,” Cascade rolls out on a static-drenched wave, its misty sound mass not hugely unlike Wolfgang Voigt's Gas and its simple, melancholy theme suggestive of Satie. The thirty-five-minute collection segues from the brief ambient-classical fog of “Further” to the stately, meditative calm of “The Wait,” each of the recording's six settings unlike in certain ways yet still sharing enough in style and sound design to ensure cohesiveness is preserved. Throughout the set, delicate melodies extricate themselves from the haze, their edges blurred by granular grit and dust as they drift serenely across softly murmuring drone fields, until “Shoreline” guides the listener gracefully ashore, both soul and spirit amply rejuvenated and replenished.
Though the album cover shows a snow-covered mountainside, Cascade is hardly chilly; if anything, its soothing melodies, no matter how fragmented they are, envelop the material with warmth. Further to that, the thick electric guitar textures that figure prominently in “Movement,” for example, aren't used to abrasive effect but to reinforce the towering magnitude of the sound mass. As much as anything else Cascade offers compelling evidence that the ambient music created by this Toronto-based artist hold ups perfectly well against material of similar type produced anywhere else, including the UK.June 2018