Slow Dancing Society: The Torchlight Parade
Hidden Shoal

More than a decade after the release of his first Slow Dancing Society collection, The Sound of Lights When Dim, Drew Sullivan continues to uphold the high standard of that debut with his ninth album, The Torchlight Parade. And not only has he maintained the standard of that opening set, he's remained inordinately productive: the new one comprises not one but two volumes, the second of which is scheduled to appear in August. Totaling twenty-seven tracks in all, the double-album release offers an encompassing portrait of this distinguished ambient-electronic artist.

Sullivan drew for inspiration for the project from his home town of Spokane, Washington, with all of the track titles purportedly names of actual roads or places. The strategy certainly appears to have been a clever one: rather than randomly casting about for subject matter to spark his imagination, Sullivan instead was able to close his eyes, visualize a particular setting, and let associations and sense memories crystallize into musical form, much like witnessing the details in a Polaroid photo gradually forming before one's eyes.

The sound of The Torchlight Parade is classic Slow Dancing Society—which might prompt one to ask what it is about Sullivan's work that makes it so immediately identifiable as his. It's typically classified as ambient, which isn't inaccurate, even if it's hardly ambient in the wallpaper sense. There's so much evocative atmosphere, detail, and activity in a given Slow Dancing Society track that it fully rewards attentive listening, yet it's also true that it could function as soothing background music if played at a low volume. It's certainly not IDM or post-rock, though the clickety-clack of beat patterns and the insistence of rhythmic propulsion are often present; still, no one will ever mistake Sullivan's music for techno or house. Certainly one of the key aspects that identifies a track as one of his is the inclusion of electric guitar. Favouring a clean, distortion-free sound that's more Mark Knopfler than Jimmy Page, Sullivan augments his keyboards-heavy arrangements with chiming guitar figures that instantly brand a piece as one by Slow Dancing Society. Above all else, though, it's his fine-tuned artistic sensibility that comes through in everything he creates.

In the richly evocative opening tracks “Audubon Park,” “Manito,” and “Riverside,” Sullivan shows his sensitivity to sound design and masterful command of arrangement are pitched at his customary high level. Acoustic piano, bass, guitar, and synthesizers work together to colour the sound field with resplendent detail, while the echo-treated throb of minimal beat elements powers the material with just the right degree of animation. Eschewing the long-form soundscape style favoured by some ambient artists, Sullivan opts for pieces that being in the two- to three-minute range almost qualify as miniatures. Yet even when these fourteen statements come and go quickly, they never feel incomplete; instead, they fit together like puzzle parts whose meaning coheres when experienced as a collective whole.

Much of The Torchlight Parade conjures images of the neon-lit city at night, with streetlights bringing parts of it out of the shadows and the others retaining degrees of mystery when shrouded in darkness. It's not a feeling of threat exactly, but there is a suggestion that something ominous and foreboding might be around the corner. Stated otherwise, it would hardly be correct to call Sullivan's world Lynchian, yet some small trace of Mulholland Drive is detectable in the DNA of this first volume.

June 2018