Kris Force (Amber Asylum) is an electroacoustic composer, performer, and visual artist working out of the San Francisco Bay area. This April she released an amazing set of long-form drone compositions dedicated to the mountains of the Pacific Northwest entitled Cascade (Silent Records). Recorded in 2019, the album’s six tracks were composed using custom software synthesis.
While the instrumentalist and vocalist has used a variety of experimental approaches, both new and old, to music and sound-making through her career, Cascade chooses a minimalist approach of focused tone to create this hushed but monumental effort. Like the album’s Three Sisters, a trio of volcanic peaks in Oregon, or a glimpse of jutting granite through the clouds, Force’s “devotional drones” have the power to stop the mind in its tracks.
Cascade is sound essentialized to its most potent and primal form. If music stokes and vibrates our deepest emotions as a way of bringing them to our attention for potential release, Force’s tonal approach demonstrates the power of sound to integrate being at the highest levels. Like standing on a mountain peak in the crystalline atmosphere above the passing clouds below, listening to Cascade the everyday drama of life seems to drop away as the deep abiding power of the mountain and rarified air tune one’s Awareness to its Infinite Source.
