Mosaics within Mosaics by Circulatory System (review)

Back in 2014, I wrote about a dozen record reviews for a website called Buzz and Howl. It was later hacked and disappeared into the ether. This is one in a series of posts intended to preserve that work, unedited. 

Circulatory System, Mosaics within Mosaics

There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when instant access to all the world’s information wasn’t something a person could reasonably expect. These small dark spots of not-knowing in the fabric of your working daily knowledge allowed a powerful force to seep through. We called this force mystery.

I first heard the words “Elephant 6” the winter I turned 20. Although it had been released three years previously, it seemed to me that everybody in the music press was suddenly talking about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea; it almost felt like Kid A’s only competition for Album of the Year. I listened to it, experienced the personal epiphanies and obsessional tendencies typically attendant to one’s first encounter with Neutral Milk Hotel, and then asked my cooler friends if they knew anything about this band.

They knew it was somebody named “Jeff Magnum”--back then everybody mispronounced it “Magnum”--and that he was somehow related to this Elephant 6 thing, which may have been a record label or a production company, but could have been an old timey street gang for all we knew. I was handed a stack of records, many of which didn’t feature the names of the albums, or even the bands. I remember being shown the Frosted Ambassador album and told, “We know this is the same people because it sounds like Olivia Tremor Control, and the cover art is obviously in the same hand as all this other stuff.” But we didn’t know who that artist might have been. The mystery was half of our fascination with these guys--and the mystery extended to the music itself. We imagined the sounds were being piped in from some otherworldly carnival decades ago, and sometimes didn’t even know what kind of instrument was creating the sounds we were hearing.

A decade and a half later and I know that the artist whose hand we were recognizing in all those painted album covers was Will Cullen Hart, I know that he was in Olivia Tremor Control, and I know that he formed Circulatory System when they broke up. Mystery is in short supply these days, but it still clings to the Elephant 6 guys. Nothing in this world is mysterious, but at least they used to be. Circulatory System have always held special esteem for me because their self-titled debut was the first Elephant 6 record that I was there for. I saw it at the record store (Amoeba on Telegraph in Berkeley), recognized it for what it was, took it home, put it on the turntable, and was baffled by it. Which was only fitting.

Circulatory Systems new album, Mosaics Within Mosaics, reminds me of that first one. Melodies recur across tracks like operatic leitmotifs, causing us to remember earlier portions of the record even while still listening to later parts of the record. It echoes across itself, disrupting our sense of time. It’s thirty-one tracks sometimes seem to last far longer than the hour it actually takes to listen to them, and at other listens you are shocked to realize how much they fit into this relatively short running time. Sixty minutes isn’t long in our current era--no longer even dictated by the length of a CD anymore, artists can go on as long as they want, but Mosaics Within Mosaics wouldn’t fit on the two sides of a record, and we used to call that a “double album.” For Hart’s idols, The Beach Boys, this would’ve been an epic.

Many of the tracks fit the under-two-minute-experimental-sketch format, but there are some actual songs, too. Strangely, these don’t often go on for too much longer than two minutes either, and are sonically very similar. This sonic consistency also serves to leave the listener in a state of temporal confusion; as songs fade out and strange little sketches fade in we’re apt to lose track of where we are in this rushing river of sound. Best just to turn off our minds, relax, and float downstream: as the title to one track has it, “There is No Time But Now.” One of the standout song-songs is “Over Dinner the Cardinal Spoke,” a classic example of Elephant 6 lyricism, with its title (and title character) giving off a whiff of the old-timey, and its whimsical references to an “April Fool’s joke” and “things your mother never told you.”

There are eight, sequentially numbered tracks called “Mosaic” sprinkled throughout the album (in addition to the title track, “Mosaics Within Mosaics”). These mostly serve to remind us why Will Cullen Hart was considered the “experimental” half of Olivia Tremor Control’s central songwriting partnership, with his sadly deceased old friend Bill Doss representing the “pop” side of the equation. But the final in the series, “Mosaic #8,” is pretty as hell and charged with forward momentum. Despite being a two-minute instrumental, it’s my favorite “song” on the record. In true Elephant 6 fashion, much of what is here is bafflingly beautiful, but what is most exciting about the release from a long-term fan’s standpoint, is that much of it is simply... beautiful.