Storm Static Sleep: A Pathway Through Post Rock

by Jack Chuter

With Valtari, the group touched upon a cloud of activity that had been thickening in the skies above the post-rock landscape. There was a strand of ambient music operating between the peripheral consciousness of film score and the poignant melodic underbelly of post-rock. Artists like Eluvium and Hammock were uprooting the anchorage of rhythm and leaving post-rock to drift freely through space, tidally shifting between nascent hope and melancholy. In an interview with Clash, Sigur Rós described Valtari as “an avalanche in slow motion”, a description that also applies to the momentous inevitability of Hammock. Like a marble on an tilting tabletop, tiny harmonies gathered density through gradual accumulations in momentum, gradually turning into gigantic, orchestra-wide waves of major key euphoria. With Eluvium’s record Talk Amongst the Trees, shapeless breaths of guitar drone curled like smoke around pianos and synthesised strings. Melodies emerged and receded into reverberant fog; the vague presence of post-rock / neo-classical melodic sensibility (also celebrated by composers such as Clint Mansell and Ludovico Einaudi) was the only thing preventing the sound from becoming a free-flowing mist of drone.