Album Review: Simon Scott - Insomni

In the year of our based god, 2015, releasing a new album as one, long seamless track is a bit of a precocious and ostentatious thing to do. Simon Scott’s latest release, Insomni, is not the first to do it, and it certainly won’t be the last, but it’s the lossless 24-bit WAV file I downloaded onto my desktop and am listening to right now, and am focusing my efforts on with this review.

Clocking in at exactly 42 minutes, plus two additional bonus tracks that didn’t make the cut into the final product, Insomni is structured as an album you just listen to front to back—you don’t skip ahead, you don’t listen to something a second time. There are songs, or movements, or ideas, really, buried within those 42 minutes, but they stay buried until you’ve dug deep enough to find them—fleeting moments really, that move on as the track continues through.

You may recognize Scott’s name as A) being two first names, but b) being the drummer in the seminal shoegaze outfit Slowdive. He started making ambient and experimental solo records a number of years ago, with Insomni serving as the follow up to 2012’s Below Sea Level.

Scott tracks his way through all the standard experimental and ambient moments on Insomni—harsh noise, gorgeous, expansive soundscapes, and thick, affected acoustic guitar plucking. Some of it is quite impressive; but given the structure of the album, it is difficult to know where, or exactly when these moments will occur, and if they will occur again.

Insomni arrives like a sketch book already full of ideas—but rather than a book, the ideas are all drawn out on one, long scroll of paper and it’s your job to slowly look through it, trying to make some sense of what you are being shown. While some may think one seamless track would be a great way to present experimental music that segued in and out of each track, in this instance, these are all stand alone pieces; so the fact that it’s one long track is just part of “the experience.”

While the harsh feedback blasts can be a little grating (I’m losing my taste for noise, I fear) the farther you get into Insomni, the more palatable it becomes with the acoustic guitar-based tracks taking over in the latter half.  There are some artists that say the want you take their album as a whole—Simon Scott is one of them, and he’s not fucking around. In Insomni, he’s creative both a maddening and impressive effort.

Insomni is available now via Ash International.