Vancouver based solo artist Amir Abbey’ Secret Pyramid brings cavernous tones out of a deep but familiar well. Anyone who has had an ear on Kranky’ stable will feel immediately comfortable in Amir’ icy drone wasteland, which is always sculpturally perched on top of a simpler harmonic progression of aching beauty.
There are a lot of familiar touchstones on this album – Tim Hecker, Stars Of The Lid, and the more ambient groups of the Kosmiche school. Over eight tracks, treated guitars and attack-denuded keys swell over repeating chord patterns, all crawling out of impossibly long reverbs. It’s western music’ essential harmonic ingredients zoomed in on, time stretched, looped and examined in reverent detail. Conceptually, it’s like disappearing deep inside four notes that really went by in a second, and slowing them down to a five minute span.
All eight tracks share the same modus operandi, but the sheer beauty of the result saves the work form being inane. This is the sound of glaciers colliding and galaxies being born, all watched from a safe, contemplative and opiated distance.
Only on closer “Escape’ do you see into the reality behind the huge washes of sound – a simple electric piano part with tremolo, forcing the white noise symphony into the background. This is what Secret Pyramid is with the reverb and delay turned down (it’s still there), zoomed in to the detail in the landscape. Being personal, it becomes even more lonely than the million stars of the other seven tracks.
