The big finish, “Total Perspective Vortex,” goes even harder. “There Is One of Which You Never Speak” builds to a shorting mess of circuitry, almost shocking from a group that usually abhors any stereo chaos. Others explode the elegant façade with exhilaration. Several songs dance on rapid pizzicato strings or driving violin ostinatos, while others incorporate tight, breathless arias. But there are more varieties of motion and force here than their imperious stasis usually allows. The hopeful uncertainty of O’Halloran’s piano lends human scale to towers of holy drones and fuming strings. The tempo is solemn, the pacing regal, the mood perpetually expectant. On Invisible Cities, their established neoclassical-ambient template is perfectly intact, with wide, spreading basses on the bottom, distorted melodies sharply etching the high end, and soft harmonies shifting in the abyssal middle. Chip away all that agate and chalcedony, and Marco Polo is not describing cities, but how memory structures them, and what longings attached to them-two themes AWVFTS know well. Any AWVFTS album would resonate with the beautifully wrought shape of Calvino’s prose, its sentimental, sorrowful grandeur, and the dreamlike flow of glittering details. In Calvino’s 1972 novel, the 13th-century explorer Marco Polo describes imaginary cities to his contemporary, Kublai Khan, the Mongolian emperor later immortalized by a laudanum-dazed English poet. But in this happy case, the applied content could hardly be more harmonious. Ambient musicians do have a habit of imputing weirdly specific concepts to interchangeable drones. That’s certainly the case on Invisible Cities, the score for a sprawling dance theater production based on Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel. The only noticeable difference between the duo’s albums and commissions is the latitude that they allow themselves on the latter. Pianist Dustin O’Halloran’s most famous song is the Transparent theme, while Adam Wiltzie-whose ambient group Stars of the Lid launched countless hum-alikes-was tapped to score the big Whitney Houston doc for reasons even he doesn’t understand. Two of the group’s four LPs are scores, not even counting two other compositions for film soundtracks. But those lines seem especially blurred in the case of A Winged Victory for the Sullen, whose second album, Atomos, was written for McGregor.
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