And Now Is The Twilight Of Our Empire – Josh Lord (Music The Lord Taught Us)
It’s three songs and digital only. Produced by Loki Lockwood of Spooky Records. The eponymous title track, then “I Can No Longer Remember The Future” and “The Warm Embrace of Machine”.
What we have here might initially strike you as some very cleverly manipulated drone. However, “drone” is, along with terms like “ambient”, “post-punk” and “industrial”, an incredibly misleading descriptor.
“And Now Is The Twilight Of Our Empire” opens with a delicious hover, somehow ominous and yet tempting at the same time. It's simple, small, yet huge, rich. The music rises and falls, seems to move forward yet back, shifting it's butt on the couch but appearing motionless. I won't say Sade without the irritating vocalist. Just like Josh Lord's artwork, we are drawn in, taken aback, but encouraged. We see ourselves, our lives, the signs around us, in Josh's art, and in his music we are enwrapped in comforting blankets of music.
You get the warm fuzzies as the storm rages around you when you're safe inside and snuggly? Yeah, me too. A delight that we're not out there in the monstrous sturm und drang. There's a short spoken piece by Adelaide's Holly Myers, too; but I don't want to give the game away here. All you really need to know is that these gorgeous, semi-naked structures get you involved, slowly winding their limbs around your body.
“I Can No Longer Remember The Future” is a darker kettle of soot, initially a cross somewhere between a grumpy jet engine and a tinnitus symphony heard from inside a nuclear bunker. It is, frankly, awesome personified.
“The Warm Embrace of Machine”...well, it's magnificent; you won't be able to bumble round the house doing the dusting to this one. I really don't want to bang on about this music too much, because there's basically a lot going on, even if you might not think so initially. And no, I know this music isn't for everyone. If all I listened to was rock'n'roll I think I'd be stunted, stumped and cauterised. Rock ain't enough, and thank the stars for visionaries like Josh Lord.
A little context is in order. “And Now Is The Twilight Of Our Empire” is the soundtrack to Josh's last exhibition at the Compendium Gallery in Victoria, “The Ancient Future”. The Gallery wrote of it: “Josh's work moves between the shimmer of imagined futures and the echoes of forgotten pasts. Drawing inspiration from the foundations of cyberpunk— “Blade Runner”, “Neuromancer”, “Akira” —and from the philosophical provocations of Jean Baudrillard, Lord’s practice explores the aesthetic tension of ‘high tech, low life’. His layered, neon-soaked worlds are alive with overlapping signals and subcultures, where technology saturates every surface, yet human presence remains fragile, fleeting, and uncertain.”
Running alongside these futuristic visions is Lord’s ongoing dialogue with the ruins of antiquity and the hubris of empire. Archaeological fragments remind us that civilisations before our own once believed themselves eternal, only to crumble into silence and dust. By setting these echoes of the past against the restless saturation of the present, Lord opens a space where innovation and collapse, shimmer and ruin, are seen not as opposites but as inseparable.
Threaded through his practice is a sense of “future history,” where familiar cultural icons are stripped of their original meanings and reborn as relics. A Coca-Cola sign becomes an object of devotion, fragments of advertising resurface as ritual emblems of neo-tribalism. In this way, Lord’s work asks us to see the present as it will one day be remembered: fragile, distorted, reimagined, and ultimately reinvented.
His art is a meditation on cycles of permanence and impermanence—an invitation to reflect not only on what we inherit from the past, but also on what future generations may inherit from us."
All of which seems to imply that we're waiting on the Apocalypse. Which I won't disagree with. But I will point out that the imminence of our own autocides have been a component of Josh's work for decades now. As has his fascination with the possibilities of modern music.
Sure, when an artist immerses themselves in their work and the emotive forces which impel them, their concentration acts as a vortex, where everything around them becomes drawn into the whirl and transforms according to the physics found there. Such immersion can be a good thing (as well as a bad thing). The immersion can also be isolating - socially and physically.
However, Josh Lord embraces the past and the future, confronts us in our cultural yearning, our nostalgia for a futurism we never quite claimed, for a past we can’t quite recall.
Let’s face it, a huge amount of modern art is received by the greater public with indifference - and if ‘confronted’, many mortals simply shrug and move on.
Lord confronts himself as much as anyone else; this isn’t an artist stuffing something “shocking” in in our Krimbo stocking (or in front of a camera) and daring us to dismiss it or not to be offended.
No, Lord is an artist striving to express what consumes him, to show us what is inside him - simply and with compassion. Very few viewers respond with a shrug to Lord’s art. There is power, clarity and confusion within his works, which speak vividly, confirming and denying specific thoughts the artist has, perhaps occasionally forcing us to reconsider our place, and our moral balance.
For these reasons alone Lord’s work deserves a wider audience, a broader market, and greater recognition. Even so, his is an international as well as national career which has so far lasted over three decades.
I saw Josh play with the late Ash Wednesday in Melbourne. His music resonated as powerfully as his art. If you don't have the space for more art in your home, you definitely have the space on your hard drive. Like most music of this nature, while it's best played LOUD, it can also be played soft.
I confess I wonder what a collaboration between Josh Lord and Jeremy Gluck would result in.
