Among the broad expanse of Emma Ruth Rundle’s oeuvre, you’ll find psychedelic tinged shoegaze, Pink Floyd-y post rock, no-holds-barred art rock, dark folk, doom metal, and more—not to mention her expansive visual work.
Even as far-reaching as her catalog is, nothing can prepare you for EG2: Dowsing Voice, the second of her experimental, instrumental records released under her name. But where Electric Guitar One still mostly stayed within the realms of post rock, this record is positively feral.
A couple semantics to get out of the way first. Despite this being called “Electric Guitar Two,” most of the actual guitar work is done on an acoustic, which is drowned in effects and chopped to bits with studio manipulation. But more importantly, where this is often described as an instrumental record, that only works if you consider Rundle’s voice as an instrument, as it gets just as much airtime as her guitar. Granted, there are no lyrics to speak of, and she utilizes a lot of techniques that almost no one would consider musical. Take for instance the closing growls of In the Cave of The Cailleach’s Death-Birth (which bear a striking resemblance to the demon voice my younger sister used to talk in as a toddler), to which my wife laughed in disbelief and said, “Nat, this isn’t music.”
Granted, this isn’t the sort of thing I’d spin on the regular, but there are plenty of beautiful moments. Much more of the record sounds like the passionate and powerful “Imbolc Dawn Atop Ynys Wydryn. Ice Melts as The First Resplendent Rays of Spring Pour Over The Horizon,” where she places layer after layer of her undulating voice on top of eachother to build a cascade of sound. “Don Danann Dana Danu Ana” sounds like it might actually be a song, but for the lack of any discernible lyrics. But even at its most conventional, it remains strange, in the most wonderful kinds of ways. “
It’s hard for me to hear this record without imagining it as a sort of reaction to Engine of Hell, her most recent singer-songwriter album, which eschewed the full band bombast of Marked for Death and On Dark Horses for an intimate palette consisting of Rundle and a piano. EG2 feels a bit like opening a release valve to relieve the pressure of those restrained sessions.
It’s the sort of weird experimentalism that I have a huge soft spot for. It exists somewhere at the intersection of Sung Tongs, caroline, Sigur Rós, and Sunn O))), blurring the line between folk music, post rock, and drone. It’s hard not to picture a tribe of Emma Ruth Rundles living in the mountains as the sound of their voices echoes eerily down the valley.