Benbecula Records, 2007

In 2005, Wounded Knee (Drew Wright) released Wee Reveries for Benbecula Record’s outstanding Mineral Series. In just under 50 minutes, Wee Reveries showed Wright’s skill with time and texture as the album crawled along its four tracks of gorgeous drones. With this new album, a self-titled release, Wright introduces his listeners to a different side of his talents. On Wounded Knee, Wright explores a more organic sound by adding live instrumentation and human voices to his recordings.

Vocals are sliced, looped and layered throughout the album’s eight tracks. Physical instrumentation, both traditional and unconventional, are combined with these human sounds to form a wonderfully unclassifiable work. Like his prior releases, Wounded Knee, it is an album that will appeal to fans of electronic experimentalism. The vocals, the instrumentation, the layering and the pacing of the album all unfold like a downtempo electronic work. In spite of the singing and chanting, it’s the percussion, movement, and texture that are the primary studies here.

The album is Lo-Fi. It hisses through every song with loud whispering cracks. The scratching is so loud, in fact, that it may be intrusive to listeners who prefer their production sleek and crisp. But this fuzzy approach also adds to its human feel. Wright is intentionally building a work that creates a sense of physicality. With decided placement of opposing sounds and careful mixing, a feeling of physical space is skillfully established.

An impressive part of this work is that is exists without cliché or pretention. In spite of the high concept and artfulness, the album has a sense of humor. The most obvious traces of his humor present themselves in the some of the song’s titles. “New Dawn Coda” is an amusing combination of words, as is “Mycology is better than yours”. Wright is clearly having fun(gi) with wordplay.

On some of the songs, the vocals that are used chatter with no distinct meaning, but on others, they move forward with recognizable English. “Anthem For The Call Centre Worker”, for example, begins on a bed of subdued cow-bell-esque clicks. Vocals soon joins in with, “You’re call is important to us”. The line is stretched, harmonized, and looped alongside the accompanying verse of “may be monitored for training and quality control.” Wright doesn’t allow the joke to get old. He quickly deconstructs the words, and feeds them into an intricate maze of layering. The individual words are blended to become a chant that is just as rhythmic as anything else on the album.

Wright has crafted his own sound on Wounded Knee. With the album’s blend of organic noises, and intentional cut-ups, he has developed music for both the headphones and the campfire (a synthetic, hallucinogenic campfire, but a campfire nonetheless).