The opening, half-hour long track of this first collaborative effort between Slovakias´s Strom Noir (Emil Mat´ko) and Poland´s Micromelancolié (Robert Skrzyński) opens like an expedition settling in, unbuckling and unshouldering its backpacks and unloading its equipment, like a crew getting set up for some remote location recording (by the sea, which eventually laps into consciousness). The clatter of metal against metal, not uncharacteristic of the junk collecting of the latter, is slowly vaporized in a lilting ambient drone, a seamless marriage between “transmuted” guitar and electronics that shimmers and blinks, bearing the sonic signature of the former.
Where lies 49°05’19,3″N22°34’04,0’E? The coordinates suggest celestial or nautical observations, and Strom Noir has been drawn to the water before. As the piece ebbs out (or wanes, depending on whether we fix our gaze on the horizon or the heavens), it gently rocks, back and forth, like a lunar lullaby. The second untitled piece, just over nineteen minutes long, quavers, stabilizes, and moves forward, laps up oxygen in utterly foreign terrain. Meanwhile, as evidenced by the clank of metal on metal again, something is being built. Or disassembled, perhaps.
Time and space, according to musical theorist Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, are inseparable elements. Ultimately, the complementary hush of Strom Noir and hands-on tactility of Micromelancolié fuse and exist in a place no mathematical calculation can chart with any certainty.
