T. Gowdy - Trill Scan

T. Gowdy returns with a major statement and luminous stylistic expansion on his third album for Constellation. Trill Scan is an exquisite suite of songs, literally and figuratively about alchemy, that melds Gowdy’s background in choral and medieval music with his trademark psychoacoustic flickerpulse electronics.

Following the acclaimed Miracles (Bleep Album of the Week / Albums of the Year 2022), Trill Scan deploys human voice for the first time in Gowdy’s recorded work. Alternately sacramental and intimately personal vocals, sometimes wordless and sometimes lyrical, are stitched into superlative instrumental tracks, yielding a warmly immersive concept album that’s also his most overtly musical. The 12th century Notre Dame School of choral polyphony and 17th century Baroque style brisé each carry tonal materiality, heterodox technique, and cultural-historical symbolism central to Trill Scan’s conceptual and compositional alchemy. Gowdy integrates these references into his palette of serpentine slowburn electronics, where minimal analogue-driven techno is tinged with post-punk grit.

Gowdy sees “the modal language of medieval Europe as a less distant cousin to indigenous traditional music practice” compared to a Classical-colonial “patriarchal order of tonality that honours a system of domination” and he follows the Jungian interpretation of alchemical texts as an historical bridge to modern mythopoetic theories of the psyche, where consciousness itself acquires materiality and similarly becomes the subject of methodical symbolic analysis through deconstruction, dissolution, transformation, and reintegration.

“Strewn” is the album’s closing track: bookended by choral invocation, with pulsing earworm motorik techno in between, Gowdy whisper-sings a dreamlike vision quest of mythic-alchemical imagery: “as I washed my eyes they turned to metal / and the memories melted to the metal / the metal of my heart.” “Strewn” invokes Gowdy’s search for materialized abstraction and substantive musical immanence wrought from psycho-therapeutic subjectivity. It highlights the album’s turn towards more harmonic, historicized, and humanistic elements that commingle empyrean and earthly electronic songcraft to absorbing effect.

“gently transportative, flickering like a busted halogen lamp”
THE WIRE

“relishes the curves and tactile joys if its material, guiding towards richer states of consciousness”
ATTN:Magazine

“blissful work that bristles with effervescent energy, like brain waves coming in and out of focus”
BEATS PER MINUTE