A cracking bit of headphone ambience this from Cindytalk – a very austere rhythm-less space, Subterminal‘s minimally milled contours are full of tiny expressive shifts, subtle changes of bleak brilliance that daisy chain this album’s brooding foursome.
“See Seer Seek” is all subterraneal purrs and cavernous curls. Soupy sonics punctured in bouldering echo and tapering twist. A haunted ricochet of possibility and shimmering symphonics, the fissure-flexed crack of stormy weather that sinks back into the static detritus to tail a soft tonal exit.
The slow-burning rotisserie of sustain that is “Where Everything Sparkles And Shines” is like staring down an azure-sparked dark hole, its ominous gravities affixing your imagination to falling fractals and embering spiderwebs. The cello-like synth lines of “Systems Are Spiralling” ripened by some lovely bassy shifts and smeared percussives. A slumbering Vangelis, choralised in slipping key-lines their definition pirouetting in the pearlescence of erosion. “We Fly Away With The Birds” – a birdsong uplift to gentle static hiss, building round a growing sense of foreboding chinked in creaking timbers and choralised vapour. That chilling scimitar of backwards loops feathering the tweeting warble, as the birds’ voices slither in and out of the textural focus, to be thrown around the bead-like reflections of distant hammers and jetting apparition. Oxidising tropes of the somnambulist sketchbook closing shut on droning keys and the trill tremor of afflicted tech.Subterminal is a Mark Rothko-esque homage to emptiness, in which is trapped the firefly of our futility.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
