Aldebaran (Disc 6)

"They say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings; that in those realms where the Pole Star shines high and red Aldebaran crawls low over the horizon, there has been naught but ice and snow for thousands of years." - from Polaris (1920) by H.P. Lovecraft

One of the many astonishing features of Miles Davis' groundbreaking 1972 album On The Corner was that the very first track, appropriately titled On The Corner, begins suddenly with the band already in full groove. It's as if someone just randomly flipped the "On" switch in the studio and began recording in the middle of a jam.  There's no way of telling if the band had been playing for 30 seconds or 30 minutes before the track starts, and it takes a while for the listener to figure out how all of the many parts of the dense groove fit together.  There's a couple of funky electric guitars with wah-wah pedal, all manner of percussion, and eventually you realize that someone's playing a sitar somewhere deep down in the mix. Miles only plays a couple of notes before ceding the lead to a soprano sax, as if he was already near the end of his solo.  It's as if he's showing off how far ahead of you he is - just when you think you've got it figured out, the band's already moved onto something else. Critics initially despised the album, although it's now considered by some to be one of his greatest.

I bring this up because almost every cut on Natural Snow Buildings epic Aldebaran starts with a similar jump-scare, opening with all of the layers that will constitute the drone already going full tilt, and you, the listener, have to catch up.  However, unlike the funk-jazz of Miles, the drone of NSB doesn't really change much, and the marvel isn't that it's already morphed into something else by the time you get it figured out, but that they can maintain that mix for such extended periods.

The main event of the final Disc 6 of Aldebaran is the 32-minute opening track, God's Fossil.  It starts off like any other of the space-noise drones on the album, but eventually the guitar playing starts to evoke some of the post-rock that typified NSB's early output.  A layer introduced late in the drone is a chopped and screwed recording of a voice, a rare recent sample of the field recordings once common in their music.  This is my favorite track on Disc 6, and one of my favorites on this album.

The 19-minute Aldebaran, Cannibal Sun might be the titular tracks of the album, but musically it neither defines the rest of the album nor departs from the norm in any meaningful way.  For the record, Aldebaran is an orange giant star in the constellation Taurus, the "fiery red eye" of Kadja Bassou, the Great Bull God.  The title of the opening and closing tracks of NSB's 2008 Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches are Kadja Bassou and The Great Bull God, respectively.  Given the chance, a star can easily become a cannibal — a bigger star can swallow a smaller one. The star that gets eaten can leave its mark on the surviving star, though, among other things, it can trigger an eruption or change the way the star rotates.

After some 5 hours and 30 minutes, the Albebaran album finally closes with the track The Drowned Church.  The "shortest " track on Disc 6 (17:17), it's a little quieter and slower than most of the tracks, suggesting a sort of fuzzed-out, lo-fi ambient sound.  Some neat guitar work in the second half

rescues the track from ending the album on too passive a note.

And that's it for Aldebaran, all six discs, and that's it for Natural Snow Buildings.  To pass the quarantine time during this coronavirus pandemic, I started a chronological review of their entire discography, going back to 2001's Two Sides of a Horse on through 2016's Aldebaran, some 26 albums, many of which were two-disc or more affairs.  Now, some three months later, I'm finally at the end.

I guess that means I have to crawl out from this pile of bricks on a hill I call my home and reintegrate with society again.  Anything happen since last March I should know about?