A Citizens's Guide To Getting Into Natural Snow Buildings (Part 2)

In case you thought that at 1 hour, 5 minutes, Natural Snow Building's debut album, Ghost Folks, was too short, clear your calendar, take a deep breath and relax, and listen to their second album, The Winter Ray (2004), which clocks in at 2 hours, 33¼ minutes.  

Ranked by BestEverAlbums.com as the second best of 25 albums by NSB, The Winter Ray was originally self-released with less than 15 copies. The first run was given free to those who had been in contact with the band during the winter of 2004/2005. Later copies were given to friends of the band during the 2006/2007 period.  Today, the album can be downloaded at Disconcerted Sounds.  Here's the track list and starting times:

Disc 1 (Deux)

1. Overture (0:00)
2. I Don't Know What Psy War Is
3. Dark Side of Behaviourism
4. Broadcast (15:28)
5. Microchip Little Children
6. The Fake and Sad Lonely Gunman
7. Mae Brussell (36:25)
8. Counter Insurgency
9. Experiments on Monkeys
10. Towards a Psychocivilized Society
11. Broadcast (52:35)
12. Places of Detention
13. Un Manne D'Helicopters and Microwaves (59:32)
14. Falling Space Laser Nikola Tesla (1:08:49)

Disc 2 (Un)

1. Over Mt. Weather (1:16:31)
2. Brighton Beach
3. Fishing Hole
4. Dead Horses
5. Ethyl Bromo Acetate (1:47:02)
6. Bloody Snow (2:00:35)
7. Inside Mt Weather (2:04:41)
8. I Was Always Cold (2:09:54)
9. The Winter Ray
10. Dead Horses (By the Sea) (2:28:04)
11. The Exhausted Meteor (2:30:25)

Several of the songs on the first disc, counter-intuitively named Deux, and on the first half of the second disc, Un, flow seamlessly from one to the next creating suites - that's why the starting times aren't listed for every track.  For example, the opening Overture flows right into the ominous and creepy I Don't Know What Psy War Is and continues with Dark Side Of Behaviourism, resulting in a 15½-minute composite composition.  The fourth track, Broadcast, starts a second suite of songs at the 15:28 mark.

Song titles on Deux seem to evoke paranoid, technophobe concepts of psy-ops, behaviorism, animal experiments, and microchipped children.  Mae Brussell was an American radio personality and conspiracy theorist who hosted a radio show called Dialogue: Conspiracy (later renamed World Watchers International) in the 70s and 80s.  Based on the premise that the U.S. is secretly run by powerful groups that will stop at nothing to maintain control, Brussell started her conspiracy research after President Kennedy's 1963 assassination (The Fake and Sad Lonely Gunman) and continued to connect dots to the rise of fascism, the downing of Korean Air Flight 007, and other matters. She received many death threats over her career, including one from a follower of Charles Manson after she alleged that the Manson Family was working with the L.A. Sheriff's Department to carry out mass murders.

NSB's previous album, their debut Ghost Folks, opened and closed with tracks titled Nuclear Winter, and that theme seems to extend into Un, the second disc of The Winter Ray.  Mount Weather is a major relocation site for the highest-level civilian and military officials in case of a national emergency.  Located on a 564-acre high-security facility high in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, it's where Dick Cheney went on 9/11 and is featured in the movie The Sum of All Fears and the Call of Duty video games.  Over Mt. Weather is a cold, electronic soundscape similar to the previous Nuclear Winter tracks, without the usual guitars and percussion of other NSB songs.  Inside Mt. Weather is even more alienating, a sound-and-noise collage with no vocals and little instrumentation, electronic or otherwise, and quite unlike anything else in the NSB discography up to that point.  In addition to Mt. Weather, other song titles on Un suggest Cold War/nuclear winter themes of bloody snow, eternal cold, and the titular winter ray.  

Speaking of eternal cold, the instrumentation in the second half of I Was Always Cold, starting at the 2:09:18 mark, sounds like a working draft of the later composition Wisconsin from their popular The Dance of the Moon and the Sun album, or to put it another way, Wisconsin sounds a lot like I Was Always Cold without the field recordings.

My favorite part of The Winter Ray is probably the first 30 minutes of Disc 2, the Over Mt. Weather-Brighton Beach-Fishing Hole-Dead Horses suite.  This is arguably one of the best 30 minutes in the entire 50-hour Natural Snow Buildings discography. If nothing else, advance the video to the 1:29:48 mark and listen to the 17-minute Dead Horses (or the entire suite, if not the entire album).  It's discovering passages like this that make the formidable task of working your way through the NSB body of work so rewarding.

Despite it's length, The Winter Ray isn't an album to be rushed through or just played once from start to finish and checked off.  There's way too much here to swallow in a single serving - it's an album intended to be explored and discovered, not consumed.  That's why I recommend downloading the digital MP3 version and playing a few songs at a time, and repeating some tracks over again until you've learned the secrets of this enormous album.  It's great that it was uploaded to YouTube, but it doesn't really function best as one single extended track. 

It's amazing that for all of its treasures and rewards, The Winter Ray isn't even among the NSB albums listed on AllMuic.com or available on Spotify.  I recommend going over to Disconcerted Sounds now and getting the free download while it's still available, as the blog hasn't been updated since 2011 and I don't know how much longer it will remain on line, or how long the download links will still be active.  Because once it disappears from there, The Winter Ray may not be available again except as a YouTube stream, and that would be a shame.