I’m an unashamed Small Cruel Party fan: in a world of listening excess the project burrows to the core of chosen items, microscoping into physical objects to extract the awkward and unknown sounds at their centre. While ostensibly working with ambient sounds, Key Ransome has always been more immersive in a Honey-I-Shrunk-The-Audience kind of way: I rarely think I know what is being foraged but the sounds always seem to create expanse out of minutiae, grandeur out of smaller found objects.
It’s rather surprising, then, to play ‘Sic In Se Sua Per Vestigia Volvitur’ and immediately take a step or two back, that previous intimacy replaced with a rocky low-end rumble, upper register twitter and careening filter sweeps which seem overwhelmingly synthesizer derived, and which give side A’s “De La Beatitude Malgre Soi (Pour Daniel)” its dominant formation. While not static, the piece plays on its repetitions and constancies and settles into a singular (if uneven) repetition for most of its playing time, only revealing some welcomingly screechy harmonic tension in the final few minutes.
Reverse side “Par Chu Fait Om Un Angle Tenir Son Doit Ades Vers Le Solel” is a more familiar vernacular, although the tonal ambient drone dominates the physical rustling which quickly cowers to the back. Long-form vocal tones, misaligned rhythm and scratchy synth cast-offs add depth to the piece but again it settles into a comfortability and very little shifts once that comfort is found. There’s something of a simmering industrial tension to the last part of the track, but as with the A side there’s a long and somewhat overwrought lead-in to that modulation which doesn't really reward the outcome.
Focus and closeness have long been central to Small Cruel Party’s work, and while ‘Sic In Se Sua Per Vestigia Volvitur’ expects both it rarely rewards either. Its layered ambience is a less iconic and more mainstream expression of ideas as compared to previous releases, even acknowledging the elongated sound components that have washed across previous releases. The cassette is listenable but quick to dissipate, and without any of the intimacy of Key’s previous work. While perhaps acceptable in isolation, ‘Sic In Se Sua Per Vestigia Volvitur’ withers against the magnetism of Small Cruel Party’s previous decades of personal and more intriguing listens.
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