Here, the middleman is Morgan’s car window, protecting him from the worst of the inferno. He makes no effort on Lake Fire to situate himself on the frontlines, within the hell of crumbling vegetation and dying animals the Australian painter William Strutt captured in his great bushfire painting Black Thursday. The urgency of the climate crisis has not driven Morgan to plumb his sound for more extreme places it can venture (his extremes skew quiet, as on the magisterial drone albums coast/range/arc// and Faults, Coasts, Lines). “Arrhythmia” uses a drum beat that seems labored and burdened, but the pneumatic dub chords instantly situate us in the familiar soundworld of his 2000s Kranky run, and it doesn’t sound much more threatening than the stuff he was making about thermodynamics at the beginning of his career.

Lake Fire features some of Morgan’s best sound design since his canonical 2000s trio of First Narrows, Plume, and Endless Falls. While even the best Loscil tracks tend to a mood and milk it for seven minutes or so at a time, these songs meander freely, with the sour strings of “Candling” yielding to an odd coda where a flute synth is allowed to just play for a while. The glacial throb of “Ash Clouds” and “Doux” suggests that Morgan’s conversations with Lawrence English about “rich” sound sources that led to their awesome collaboration Colours of Air have rubbed off on his solo work. That might explain the unusually rich low end on “Bell Flame,” with a steady pulse that approximates the pace of a car that has slowed down to examine a scene of horror. This is road trip music for the new normal.

Yet you might also hope the widespread devastation on the West Coast would inspire something more substantial than a strong offering by an artist coming up on 30 years of dauntless consistency. It’s hard to shake the feeling this porous music can soak up any context in which it’s presented. Who’s to say that if it were called Equivalents 2, we wouldn’t be thinking of cute cumulus clouds instead of the dystopian brown smokescapes that have become a fact of life for so many people? Lots of those folks will probably also witness the burning of the West Coast from the relative safety of their cars, but it’s hard to say for how many more generations, or even years, such a luxury will last. If things stay the way they are, Lake Fire may be remembered less as an alarming portent than a relic of a time when we had things a lot easier.