én‘s op. 80530 needs loudness, craves it. Minimal wares that require you to be encased in its edifice, the window-shaking physicality of its dronial weathers, a humble servant to the stretching dramatics, that bare corridor eating into the shadows like some Lynchian neurosis. Feels for the majority like a key slipping a lock whilst falling down the rabbit hole, forever dangling on hooks of expectation. It’s a classy act, the album’s screw continuously turning, the vocabulary shifting focus, perspectives turned inside out, cannibalistically burrowing deeper, bleeding with machine phantoms, suggestions that seem to dance on the bonfires of your memory.
There’s a beautiful point when vines of high frequency seem to shimmer out of the speakers, dance the beyond like amputated sprites, as if detached from the rumbling other. A rather enigmatic chill that leads the smouldering tension to cough up a canker of glassy surfaces. A milk bottle marimba shook in multiples, seismic dilated until vapour-torn into some bucolic neither land. A Osiris of wall-trailing diffusion wrapped in the faint whiff of sweetness. An unexpected oasis that holds long after the sound has finished.
It’s the kind of magic that you’d be hard pushed to remix, you would suppose, but not so in this case, the accompanying 12 inch employing the talents of James Cargill, Jonathan Coleclough, Andrew Liles, Colin Potter and Sculpture (quite surprised Christoph Heemann isn’t there). A host of fellow drone devotees who do a great job of dissecting the goods, investigating the tick and the tock, mulling over the mechanism to give us a collection of reinterpretations that pay prefect homage to the original.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
