Glacial Movements have one of the most perfect record label names and so far those releases that have arrived here have lived up to the name. Tropic Of Coldness is a duo based in Brussels that work primarily in a soft focus haze of washes and drones, using mainly guitars and synths to produce gentle, drifting soundscapes. These lull in the way that the ebb and flow of a tide and a warm sun seen through barely open eyes can lull.
The feel is gently meditative on opener “Distilled Conversation” and very slow moving. It feels as though the auto focus on a camera is not working properly and each time an image becomes clear, it explodes into diffuse patterns of pale, bright light. The guitar notes hover like dust in the images, but as the track progresses a more synthy tone throws just a little shade over the proceedings, allowing just a touch of clarity.
This glacial sense of movement carries on into “The Pride Of Our Sails”, which seems just a little darker but still blurry and distant, the sense of an abandoned spaceship moving in orbit. A subtle creak grounds the sound just enough and there is a faint rhythm to the track, but with absolutely acres of space to fill. All is suffused with light and at times is barely present, the slightest glimmer of sound just about keeping the ship in focus. When sound starts to overwhelm the track, you could almost imagine this floating debris burning up as it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere in a flaming spiral. There is a gorgeous three-way between cello, guitar and feedback on “Two And A Half Stones”, the whole thing evoking some late night white sand paradise. There is solitude here, not loneliness — which generally means some sort of disharmony — but the joy or magic that being alone can bring. Adrift on a raft perhaps, the three sublime elements of the track passing one another with such subtlety and understanding it is a delight, weaving around your head like seabirds on rising thermals. I have to say that David and Giovanni, the two protagonists here, have a deftness of touch that makes this such album so easy to listen to, the warmth and fluidity seeping into your soul.Final track “Framed Waves” lasts for about twelve minutes, and I can only say it is as if they were soundtracking, in the slowest way possible, something dropping to the bottom of the ocean. It could be a body, it could be something else precious, but we are watching from the bright skies above as the darkness gradually subsumes it. Everything is slow and diffuse and somehow romantically hopeless. Scuds of echoed guitar resound as if the thing is being buffeted by passing rays or other fish, but eventually all this ends and silence reigns again.
-Mr Olivetti-
