The first song on Scaled Alps' Let the Alpine Play is called “Another Clock Song (The 7th Unveiling),” which tells you something about the group's sense of humor and almost nothing about what the song sounds like.
Piano and bass move through a rainy interior. The production language calls it “dark and purple and black velvet inside,” with a Doors/Floyd quality “whether we want to admit it or not.” More interesting is the instruction that follows: the lyrics perform openings and closures; syllables do too.
“We do not make music because we like music that's been made,” singer James Quentin Devine says.
Most contemporary music promotion proceeds through resemblance. If you like X, you may like Y. The listener is handed a map whose most important feature is the declaration that no genuine travel will be required.
Scaled Alps are not free of influences; nobody is. Their own production documents are cheerfully full of them: Scott Walker, Depeche Mode, Three 6 Mafia, Swervedriver, The Chameleons, Ryuichi Sakamoto, QOTSA, Melanie De Biasio. What disappears is the idea that resemblance itself constitutes the point.
Another Clock Song is instead concerned with pattern. Clocks run backward. Thoughts echo in mirrored rooms. Heaven's light appears, disappears and appears again. The “seventh unveiling” is simultaneously revelation, metaphysics, strip-club joke and sonic event. The song's working title was APOPHENIA.
Apophenia normally names the human tendency to perceive meaningful connections among unrelated things. It has acquired a faintly pathological scent in an era obsessed with misinformation and conspiracy, but it is also one of the fundamental operations of art.
A rhyme is apophenia with rules. A chord change asks two moments to acquire a relationship. A record sequenced in sixteen parts invites the listener to decide whether the recurrence of an image is intentional, accidental or something stranger: an accident that became intentional through observation.
The culture surrounding it is drowning in pattern-production systems. Recommendation engines infer connections among behaviors. Generative systems infer relationships among words and images. Advertisers assemble identity from sequences of clicks. The subject is encouraged to regard the resulting portrait as himself.
Devine has written elsewhere: “The ideal consumers are sold themselves first.”
Scaled Alps reverse the operation. Instead of telling the listener what the patterns mean, they provide too many possible patterns and let the listener become implicated in choosing among them. The effect is occasionally mystical and occasionally ridiculous. Those two things have historically enjoyed one another's company.