re you lonely? It’s a shame that a question of such magnitude reduces to a self-help come-on these days. Wandering through my neighborhood, bracketed by headphones blasting Crown of Marches, I encountered many other pedestrians, most more directed than myself and all of whom were encased in their own music cocoon. I felt terribly distant and totally alone. This sort of thing usually doesn’t bother me—it’s not like we would have become best friends had not electronics interfered—but I had to recognize a certain loneliness pervading my life. A tacit denial each day, in myriad non-encounters, of another’s humanity. An inevitable retreat from the cultural circus.

This sobering realization was made possible by Steven R. Smith, sole member of Hala Strana and Thuja contributor. With Crown of Marches, Smith has created an exquisitely lonely piece of music. The single 40-minute track, a pyschedelic guitar rumination of drowned melodies and slow-death feedback, is doggedly introspective. Forms repeat as if they’re pacing a basement, sluggish low-end drones blanket the horizon in dreamy, dour gray, and noah bells and bowed cymbals ring faintly with distant ecstasies beyond the clouds, out of reach.

Loneliness is not a simple negative state, a pathology of withdrawal requiring an instant remedy. It’s emotionally rich ground rife with rewards and deprivations. Crown of Marches portrays the glories of loneliness with solemn grace. When the feedback breaks at the five-minute mark and strands of golden notes unwind unmolested, the listener enjoys a moment of clarity granted only by isolation and concentration. When faint piano lines—charged with the romance of loneliness—spin off the lead guitar, only to vanish into the roiling murk, the disappearance is stunningly poignant. And ala Flying Saucer Attack, Smith can lift his piece—with sudden, sure strums—from the throes of gloom to heights of elation while still maintaining an austere atmosphere.

Smith recognizes the desperation of loneliness as well. The rolling waves of low-end noise, think Sunn 0))) in paisley instead of robes, lash Crown of Marches to an existential sadness when it threatens to drift into fuzzy solipsism. Smith controls his feedback admirably, removing it when the listener’s been immersed for just long enough, and releasing it again when the mood strays too far. The ambience provides the tonal consistency that renders Crown of Marches a self-contained world, be it a bedroom full of instruments and ideas or a whirling mind trapped in a drooping head.

Crown of Marches does not resolve, it merely returns to its beginning. In fact, progress of any kind doesn’t figure into the music much. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Crown of Marches engages a listener so completely. Smith circles his themes with the obsessive dolor of a man lamenting a lost opportunity, spawning gorgeous, tangential what-ifs and could’ve-beens. But the splash of hurdy-gurdy fades and the hopeful chime accents mute, and the listener, like it or not, is left with the regretful opening melody.

And so Smith closes the circle. But the circle is beautiful, harmonious shape, even if a lonely void fills its center.