For a slab of marble to be transformed into a face, aardvark or the like, the image needs already be written into the logical structure of the marble itself. Similarly, certain words are simply logically compatible with others. In contrast, the title The Suncrows Fall and Tree, like the phrase ‘Thursday drinks procrastination’, speaks of something out of joint. The album has a stream of conscious sort of coherence and sense of time and place. Individual compositions are a fragmented yet linked series of evocations, excursions into the void awoken by almost improvisatory plunges into the here and now. The first of two twenty-minute drone-pieces focuses on brittle shards of guitar, swarming amplified whir and showers of static drizzle. The pieces layer upon layer of psychoacoustic trickery aside, now and again mangled guitar curls, murmurs and clangs come together in an act of mimicry, slyly conveying nature’ sustaining presence in this delusional temporal continuum. As controlled yet fiercely buzzing guitar noise begins to crest, a new portal swings open that allows dreary nonsensical noise and meaningful sounds of nature to reach a synthesis, a sort of flickering between presence and absence.
After long, uninterrupted passages of sinister sounding atmospheres, a crack of lightening acts like a tremor of light illuminating the nearly forgotten surroundings and reminding one that they are profoundly worldly, however distorted and bleak they may be. The piece is also punctuated by arrangements that are hauntingly sparse. Besides making apparent that these works, for all their emphasis on strophic structures, are carefully paced and meticulously played, these near-silences act like a murky swamp whose indistinct surface and depth enables certain elements to hide, transform and reemerge in other forms. Indeed, the album as a whole has the appeal of such an indistinct surface, one whose uncertainty proves absorbing and whose shifting nature reflects numerous forms of deviance.
Max Schaefer
