One aspect of our fascination with the Gothic has always been our relationship to buildings: vast ruined castles, rambling mansions, or strange houses hidden away from the usual lines of sight; and though, traditionally speaking, the American Gothic may have been a rural phenomenon – the allure and repulsion of the woods and more generally speaking of the frontier and what this represented – there has long been a similarly Romantic relationship with crumbling, ruined buildings. These places, always rich in shadow and latent threat, act as both a kind of theatre into which we project the dark dramas of the self and also function as a metaphor for the stench of decay and the potential decline of civilization. Here be monsters. Yet, somehow the Gothic always tends to feel historical – other and old – as if instead of a comment on the present it were a series of chronologically trapped tropes and symbols, or if it were a comment on the present it was a present that is sometime ago. This isn’t now…

But look around you – the gap between creation and ruination seems to be an increasingly accelerated process, almost as if there might be a co-opting of the topology of the Gothic into the very system itself, the Gothic reborn as an urban and suburban fact. Into which spaces this strange and haunting album by Nicholas Szczepanik and Jenks Miller spreads its screeds and drones: a celebration of blind high windows and of the frozen joints of machinery; a work of mourning for a disappearing present.

These large themes aside, my first thought on listening to American Gothic were how contained and restrained it sounded, how understated. Both these artists have been involved in particularly expansive releases in the past – Szczepanik with his highly personal and sonically vast recordings (I’m thinking of Dear Dad and The Chiasmus here, both huge albums) and Miller responsible for some churningly elemental noise on the Horseback albums released to date, with last years’ The Invisible Mountain particularly ambitious in sound and scope. On American Gothic that urge towards the sonically expansive has been almost regimentally curtailed; instead, on the first few listens at least, there is a feeling of enervation and exhaustion. The opening track, ‘A Private Life’, begins with little more than a thin high-pitched oscillator drone, which is as much a feeling as a sound, something insectoid and sharp in one register, and metallic and invasive in another. As it evolves though, and a two-note organ figure appears, it noticeably ‘brightens’, becomes devotional almost, and could be a gritty beam of light trapped in a loft space.

‘White Light’ the third track here, initially has something of the same devotional air, with a gorgeous multi-tracked organ dominating the early part of the track. But this soon drops away into something dirge-like and funereal, a simple Miller drum beat over an abyss. This abyssal space is eventually filled with a harsh broiling wash of metallic static however, and it has the feel of machine noise, or something akin to a memory of noise, as if Miller and Szczepanik have somehow tapped into an industrial warehouse’s store of memories and simply presented what resided there. At first it provokes an oddly blank response, as does the track ‘Ossuary Dub’ with its clicks and deep bass underbelly, but with repeat listens the raw feeling at the heart of things is gradually revealed. That sense of restraint masks a world of suppressed emotion.

And what might such emotion stand for in these circumstances? In some senses the emotion is an artifice, to cover for the fact that the process of creation and decay is almost atemporal and co-terminous. The human element seems almost superflous. In this sense the emotion functions as an excessive injection of the human. But where are we without that? With American Gothic, Miller and Szczepanik have created a soundworld capable of evoking, and celebrating, a timeless and yet very modern phenomenon. As entire areas of cities such as Detroit and St. Louis fall into disuse and disrepair, and industrial lots and houses are left creaking eyeless in the mineral winds, maybe we’ll start to leave these recordings, these adumbrations of machine noise, swelling drones and harsh static, leave them as votive offerings to show that we partook. They will stand as our representatives – sonic celebrants of the new American Gothic.

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