#365songs (19 / 365)

My first foray into noise music, still a genre I've barely dipped my toe into but one I should maybe explore more based on how often I've listened to all 90+ minutes of Frozen Niagara Falls. "Dragonflies to Sew You Up" is emblematic of the contradictions that run through the album: bludgeoningly noisy percussion, nearly-pretty synth melodies that might be warm in isolation but still somehow fit right into the forbiddingly icy soundscape; harsh vocals that are incomprehensible either due to being extremely processed or just because they're straight up death metal screaming, as here. It all sounds pretty hostile, and it kind of is, but the synths give you something to hold onto amid the tumult.

Frozen Niagara Falls as a whole ranges even farther out than "Dragonflies to Sew You Up" would suggest. There's noise, of course, and a wider variety of it than I might have thought possible. Some of it is really just ambient music, a sort of reprieve from the intensity of tracks like this one. There's twenty minutes of spoken word, split across two tracks, accompanied by gorgeous if chilly acoustic guitar and what sounds like field recordings of some kind. It's incomprehensible that all this gels into a cohesive album but somehow it does, and a really compelling one at that.