Bleep

Broadly speaking, Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities is a book of imaginative travel writing, told in a set of covert meditations on civilisation and memory. It can be argued that the music of Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Wiltzie as A Winged Victory For Sullen similarly invites these notions through the enormity of ambient voids; each composition full, vast and overtaking, and yet as inviting of subjective interpretation from the listener as a crisp, blank page is to ink. Their Invisible Cities LP embraces a wider neo-classical palette than ever before in emulating desolate metropolises, emptied parks and train station platforms — and the eerie, cavernous silence in place of bustling life.

‘Only Strings And Their Supports Remain’ measures these deserted spaces in lengths of violin drones, ebbing and flowing atop a plucked circular rhythm that tightens and slackens across the LP, subtly fluctuating with each passing motif utterance as if slightly misremembered. Often these pieces themselves seem like extensive travel notes, some obscured by distortions — such as in the case of ‘Thirteenth Century Travelogue’ — and others intimately legible, emoted through an anchoring piano line on the likes of ‘The Divided City’.

Invisible Cities feels like a film score to an as-yet-to-be realised motion picture; and yet, its power to invoke the richest imagery is right there in sound.