With Prescient/Legend, producer and sound artist Dale Lloyd deepens his Search Ensembles project excavation after breaking ground with its 2015 self-titled debut on Lloyd’s and/OAR label. Although released 2019 on the either/OAR sibling imprint, this follow-up was culled from recordings made between 1986 and 2018 by a range of field recordists and instrumental artists, including Alan Courtis, Cedric Peyronnet, Cyril Herry, Eric Lanzillotta, Jani Hirvonen, Jon Tulchin, Mark Reynolds, Michael Northam, Mike Hallenbeck, Phil Legard, and Slavek Kwi. Lloyd sifted through their previously unreleased archives, forging timeless relationships in reassembly, while also inviting new material to be added through a variety of instruments.

“Search Ensembles started as an archaeological dig in the audio sense,” says Lloyd of the project. “I’d always wanted to do a project that revisited this planet’s history, but in a sense beyond anything we’ve learned in our school textbooks. It’s similar to something I started in early 90s called Lucid, for which we intentionally ‘weathered’ or ‘aged’ the recordings to give them an older aesthetic. That’s one of the motivating factors for digging into past recordings with so-called less-than-perfect sound quality. It felt compatible at all levels.”

Search Ensembles renders each of its sources, both organic and manufactured, as instruments in a compositional array. The result is a catalyst for elemental reactions. As far as choosing material that felt appropriate, Lloyd notes that coincidences of opportunity played an important role in shaping what emerged. “It was partially a happenstance thing. Some of the material, for instance, was gradual—things I had heard over time and which felt both appropriate and available.” Beyond that, he points to a relatively new interest in library production music as a tangible influence. Such recordings are forgotten time capsules, and hold in their nostrils the fragrances of ancient civilizations. In that sense, what we have here is nothing short of a patient awakening of buried melodies and textures after millennial slumber. In keeping with the metaphor—indeed, treating it as more than such—the album lays out artifacts still clinging to dust. Each is a village unto itself, spoken in the language of a place that no longer exists.

What follows is this listener’s own field notes, taken while surveying the album’s discoveries and calibrated by ears undeterred by temptation of silence…

1
As natural causes bubble to surface of perception, each works symbiotically with the other in a conversation so internal that it slips through the other side into an external manifesto. Tones at once distant yet so ingrained in the skin that you cannot help but be wounded by them coil around one another, searching for ideas as if they were physical traces left by immaterial souls.

2
Heartbeats and hints of thunder are kindred spirits. Their children are our ancestors, whose messages make paper of our brain tissue when we dream. Worthy only of being imbibed like plants crushed in stone and brewed into a tea of knowledge, they grow for the purpose of being snipped at the source. The crickets nestling around them are not messengers of the night, but remnants of the day speaking in tongues of sunrise.

3
Birds flock behind closed eyes, touching the liminal covering of reality with their wingtips but always returning to the percussion of flesh, metal, and bone.

4
A perpetual shushing of impulses by mothers whose evening chorus filters out the purest components of twilight. Voices are implied by the horizon’s arching back, flush with starlight as a lotus to pond’s surface. What was once implied becomes doctrinal, yearning to bring distances together: a Big Bang in reverse to the first pinprick of creation.

5
That same calling echoes here as dotted lines surround areas of conquering. Like frightened children wielding chalk on a blacktop, they reveal themselves in a tentative cartography, as predictive as it is unknowable.

6
The insects arrive with songs in their thoraxes, hidden until the final sting ejects their souls into death. They wander as if to wonder, hoping for the sky to fill in their broken choices with the possibility of a new hive, only to watch it die with roll of a farm machine intent only on destruction.

7
Splashes of water eject molecules of death, giving way to imaginary towers whose resonant chambers are the beginnings of life.

8
The printing press of the night leaves its mantras visible in the sky above, while the ground below thrives with pre-cultivation memories. A synthesizer is aurora to the flute’s borealis, reaching in for warmth and finding a talisman that is cool to the touch.

9
Static made biological: a song of conception, fertile in its detail. In the background: the cry of a mother yet to be born.

10
Overtones are undercurrents of faith, each dripping with reason until only truth is left in its evaporated wake.

Throughout this album, things hidden in the recesses of our collective past are being reckoned with sonically. More than that, they are turned in the hands until their sharpest points become rounded. A roof over solace, a library of parthenogenetic design whose shelves are as layered as the rock from which they were unearthed. “We’re documenting cultural activity,” Lloyd observes, “something that hasn’t been documented in any other way or is far less known to us.” More than unknown, I would venture to say that what we stumble upon here is a culture that does not exist except by the grace of those fortunate enough to give it three dimensions in the listening.

(For ordering information and to hear a sample, click here.)