The aptly-named This Culture of Background Noise comes at a time when the privileged citizens of the industrialized world have become almost saturated by sound. Cars rumble at all hours of the day and night, cell phones are constantly ringing, and “personal” music players with the volume turned up way too loud leak Billboard Top 40 sonic abortions into your precious living space. In recording terms, “background noise” is a catch-all term for electric hums and other such acoustic disturbances which exist in the background of the recording space. The noise is undesirable because distracts and degrades the artist’s music, and it’s getting harder and harder to avoid. In more general terms, however, background noise is any sound which you ignore in order to pay attention to the task at hand. It could be cars driving on city streets, crickets chirping sweetly in the night, or the sweet tinnitus tone left as a gift by the band you went to see the night before. If we wish to focus on anything anymore, we must drown out successively larger amounts of background noise. Forget global warming; noise pollution is the real enemy of the 21st century.

But there’s another definition of “background noise” that should be noted. Within the realm of astrophysics, the term refers to what is more precisely known as “cosmic background radiation,” which is electromagnetic noise in space which originally seemed to have no source. At first, scientists just tried to ignore or drown out the noise, since it was interfering with their measurements. But then they decided to study the noise itself and they found that this electromagnetic interference actually consisted of microwaves sent out from the edge of the universe, more than 13 billion light years away. These microwaves were in fact a snap shot of the beginning of the universe, and are now regarded as the best (and most complete) evidence available for the Big Bang theory. Once a simple annoyance, this “background noise” has become one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of cosmology.

Because of Ghosts have crafted a sophomore album dedicated to exploring background noises of their own making. Nearly every song begins and ends slowly, with the instruments coming into the scene one by one, and leaving just as they came. In the quiet moments before and after the instruments have picked up speed, there are clicks and strums haunting the background, and soothingly arrhythmic* drums fill the air. What is this? It’s simple: Because of Ghosts have written their own organic static into their music. The whole effect is rather like tuning an old analog radio into a favorite station; it takes a little time and accuracy to hit the frequency just right. In the mean time, you get partial sounds and lots of warm static.

But if you listen closely, you’ll find that this “background noise” isn’t just present at the beginnings and ends of the songs. Indeed, it runs throughout the entire work, changing in timbre and melody to suit the work at hand. It’s almost as if every track contains two separate songs, layered on top of each other. The primary one drowns the other out much of the time, but every once in a while, the background manages to break through. An excellent example of this is on the brilliant fifth track, “Life’s Little Victories,” which features primary and secondary tunes ebbing and interweaving like sine and cosine functions plotted on the same graph. Whenever the main tune cools down for a bit, we are treated to the reemergence of the background noise, and we greet it like an old friend.

But there’s more going on here. The background noise functions as a connection to the rest of the album, as it sounds almost, but delightfully-not-quite, exactly like a combination of the stringed intro to the remorseful second track, “Canadia,” and its ambient coda, “Heroes Are People Too.” Perhaps this is a coincidence, something that Because of Ghosts did not intend to write into the music. Perhaps I’m just hearing similarities where I want to find them. But to my ears, this “background noise” connects the album into one breathing whole, tying the music together with sonic bands of barely-noticeable but always present love.

Everything that is good and great about This Culture of Background Noise can be found on the closing track, “Dreaming Is Essential,” a song as pretty as its name. As the work treks along its nine-minute runtime, the listener is never once left bored, but neither is he manipulated into the false excitement of a crudely constructed crescendo. Indeed, that metaphor does not work for This Culture of Background Noise at all. What we have here are not crescendos, but swells, temporary gatherings of music moving in and out like the tide. As the primary music enters and retreats from our consciousness, new elements astonish our ears with every lunar-powered rotation.

This Culture of Background Noise is a work bedded to its own cyclical nature. Like competing sine waves, oscillating around a common line, the songs emerge out of the background noise at just the right moment, as those waves manage, for a few blissful minutes, to converge on each other and create works of immaculate art. But soon enough the functions diverge, and the music sinks slowly back into the ether, waiting for the waves to come together once more. In the mean time, we’ll have to satiate ourselves with the static, the ebb and flow of a universe which presents itself readily to the listener who is willing to pay attention. Forget tuning out the background noise – this album leads me to embrace it.

And how beautiful it is!

-Tom Butcher

*: It’s not often that a critic will use the term “arrhythmic” to speak favorably of a drummer. I am quite delighted to have found one of the exceptions.