Alejandro Morse

Hotel Hastings

Alejandro Morse’s new album is a slow burning opus, that discretely unveils its darker, more twisted side as it moves across its ten magnetic pieces.

For a lot of people, the combination of the words "East" and "Hastings" will bring out the urge to suddenly break out their guitar and start playing the famous descending scale on that song by a band whose name I cannot remember for some reason. For the rest, the ones that have actually visited the place, it will evoke images of a dark underbelly in an otherwise, very idillic place.

Edgar Medina, who makes music under the Alejandro Morse and Transistor aliases, has composed what could only be -to my limited knowledge- the very first score to accompany a book. I was able to read a few excerpts of it, and it poetically depicts the author’s adventures while living in a hotel down in one of Vancouver’s most infamous streets. It paints portraits of all the dubious and sketchy characters he meets along the way, like a man who looks like Dustin Hoffman, whom everyone calls The Invisible Man because he is always wearing the “incognito mode” attire (that cheap analogy shows why I am not a professional writer).

All these peculiar personalities manifest sonically through the cracks of every harmonic clash these infinite textures generate; as if these represented the hallways in which we run into each character. They twirl and swirl around us -sometimes delicately, sometimes harshly- adding new, and often ephemeral, embellishments to the gigantic aural structures that support them. This is a slow burning opus that discretely unveils its darker, more twisted side as it moves across its ten magnetic pieces.

Hotel Hastings is engrossing, deeply introspective and even without having to read the piece of literature it is providing the score to, one does get the feeling that there is a story lying underneath. This is due to a keen sense of connection that lingers all throughout the tracks. For some it might be monotonous, but others will rejoice on how the songs seamlessly weave into each other, creating a coherent and continuous flow.

For every action, Alejandro has a reaction waiting on the next track: "Check in" drones in a low register, slowly paving the way to high pitched tonalities which continue on "Endless Rain", as if the doors to a new world have been opened; "Neon Pig God" flickers like a broken neon sign that collapses and then explodes, making "Expedition" burst with light as a direct result. Whether one follows the intended concept or not, the level of musical storytelling is so vivid, that it will be easy for everyone to create their own story.

The compositional backbone remains mostly similar, with a few stylistic deviations. "Back to Hastings" is the closest this album will have to a standard song, but even then, its obtuse and cracking texture makes it sound like an alien's failed attempt at composing "human music". However, its weird cadence along with the distant, eerie whistling melody effectively paint a lonely picture filled with an overwhelming sense of melancholy which resonates with a bizarre sensibility. It evokes this paradoxical image of someone happily taking a stroll, pushing a shopping cart throughout the streets of East Hastings while everything crumbles around them. This might be the darkest moment on the album just because how it nonchalantly shows its twisted side.

There is no doubt that this LP oozes raw emotion and it does inspire powerful images, but where Morse fails -or perhaps it was not even the intention to begin with- is in offering something new or fresh to the listener; songs like "13th Floor" and "Children of East Hastings" will give the notion of having been heard before, on another album by another artist. Nonetheless, Alejandro knows how to take advantage of the genre's basic blueprints in order to provide an experience so rich in textures and volume, that it is almost tactile in nature. The way it safely moves around the edge, carefully measuring every step not to fall over, might end up making Hotel Hastings feel like it could belong to a "How To Make an Ambient Album" crash course, but at least it will be teaching you how to make a really good ambient record. You might want to pay attention.

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