As part of Arcana’s 10^th birthday celebrations, we invited our readers to contribute with some of their ‘watershed’ musical moments from the last 10 years.

Editor Ben Hogwood, after much consideration, has chosen a piece of immersive ambience from the Pacific coast.

“Getting to know new music is one of life’s joys – but it does bring with it a danger that the listener does not return to their successes as often as they might or should do. When I was thinking through my musical highlights from the last 10 years it was difficult to bring one specific artist or event to mind. There have been several from my work elsewhere, writing for musicOMH – discovering Bruce Hornsby’s new direction, or following the music of Erland Cooper and its Orcadian connections. Western classical music has provided some memorable moments too, few more so than Sir Simon Rattle conducting Mahler at the BBC Proms.

Yet the one I settled on for Arcana’s 10^th anniversary is a thread running through the site’s whole decade, my love of the extraordinary music of Loscil. This is the alias used by Scott Morgan, a Canadian who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia – and whose music is like none other.

Perhaps it’s the fact I have been to Vancouver on several occasions, visiting relatives, that I feel such a strong connection to Loscil’s music. But there is something primal about it that really tugs not just at the heart but at the very fibre of our being, a connection formed between music and the earth. It is the deepest ambience you can imagine in music, an extraordinary achievement when you examine the relatively simple tools used in its construction.

The best example for this is the third section of the Equivalents album from 2019 – a timeless wonder that is deep as the ocean, as wide as the sky. There are clouds on the horizon, and the music paints all these and more in its extraordinary span.

In a memorable interview for Arcana, Scott summed it up. “There is a way of using the creative process and the creation of music to express that which you can’t express in other ways, and that’s what ends up coming out a lot of the time.” Later he noted, “a lot of my work accidentally plays with the spectrum between the natural world and the industrial world…ultimately I think I’m after some sort of balance of what it is to be human, and what it is to be human inside of this natural world we live in.”

I saw Scott perform this music live, at Rich Mix in the heart of Shoreditch – and it was only seconds before we were transported away. In my head I was stood on a beach at the far west of Vancouver Island, experiencing the weather with all its primal force.

You can listen to the album on Tidal below:

Published post no.2,439 – Saturday 8 February 2025