Swine by Ian Drennan

The second offering from Ian Drennan on Soap Library, "Swine" is — surprisingly — an interpretation of traditional Scottish folk songs. The 10-track collection oscillates between sampled acoustics, musique concrète textures, and ghostly snippets drawn from the Child Ballads, a collection of Scottish ballads anthologized in the mid-19th century.

Measurement, possibility, and balance guide Drennan’s career as an engineer and his musical style. Both "Swine" and "Me My Imp" (Drennan’s debut album on Soap Library) evoke a terse balancing of the elements that give way to musical mis en scène where various characters and elements converge. Swine alternates between moody ambient soundscapes that evoke the darker motifs of the Child Ballads — enchantment, devotion, insanity — and jaunty acoustic melodies culled from Jeannie Robertson and Robert Cinnamond’s contributions to Topic Record’s "The Voice of the People" anthologies. These alternating suites form two parallel narratives that converge during the album’s final track — an unfettered expression of prickly softness and pastoral release that one might listen to while picking raspberries in Blairgowrie.

"Swine" revels in Drennan’s ability to preserve potent history in a state of inertia. Fittingly, each "Swine" cassette tape is accompanied by a vial of argon gas supplied by Luciteria Science. This little-discussed gas takes on extraordinary properties in isolation, preventing volatile chemicals from degradation by creating a protective cloud of decay-resistant gas. When ionized under high pressure, argon emits a familiar lavender glow.

"Swine" is available in cassette and digital formats on February 12, 2021. Physical copies of the tape are limited to an edition of 20 and are accompanied by a glass vial of argon gas housed in a protective case. Relax — the air we breathe is one-percent argon.

Soap Library is a holistic cassette tape label in New York City.

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