(Andy Synn bows down before the new album from Light Dweller, out this Friday on Avantgarde Music)
It’s pretty well documented by now that, generally, I prefer “bands” over solo projects.
There’s just something about the magic that happens when you get a group of musicians together and they start to bounce ideas off of each other, introducing an element of randomness and quantum chaos as they feed on each other’s energy, which seems to produce (in my opinion anyway) more interesting results.
But the work of Cameron Boesch, aka Light Dweller, has always been an exception to this particular “rule”, as he’s developed such a distinctive creative voice over the years weaving together bits and pieces of Immolation and Ulcerate, Krallice and Gorguts, and beyond, that there’s never any fear of his work falling afoul of stock tropes and standard clichés.
2022’s Lucid Offering in particular stood out as easily his magnum opus, striking a brilliant balance between atmosphere and dissonance, introspection and aggression, that was always going to be hard enough to replicate, let alone surpass.
Which I suppose begs the question… what do you do when you’ve reached the top of your particular, personal mountain? Where the heck do you go from there?
