Loving the minimal murmur of Distant Animals‘ Lines LP, featuring one lengthy excursion per side, the first taking a more Éliane Radigue-like approach.
“A Pure Drone” is an unsullied flat-line ripple stretching a heat-grazed horizon of the type La Monte Young still surfs as slow-folding oscillations blood-knot your imagination, the surging curves of which give out a strange dimensionality. There’s a heaviness to the serpenting grain, your ears caught in their reflective mirages, the apparitional harmonics reading your inner-verse as the meditative strips irrelevance away, alternates into a dilatory of purring pulsations. A masterful slo-mo of warped symmetrics that circle a fading atmospheric.
By contrast, “Line Made By Walking” on the flipside is beset with juttering frequencies and reverberating slippage, jewel-like tonalities that descend into ferric hiss. The deep gong-like reverbs that accompany it make shimmering contours that mentally flicker in your mind’s eye in fading multiples as a choral under-creep heralds an over-saturating grate of orchestrated plunges. A feisty fire which is exhilarating and monstrous, tumour-torqued in half-lights and metallic accents. Textures that titter into a modem-like mummer of grainy frequency cones. Surfing shapes that cross-contaminate, unlocking in eel(ing) electronics. Lines is an exemplary statement of sonic wizardry that Distant Animals stabs satisfyingly. A trip the fine-art postcards enclosed created by Layla Tully enfold, their grainy qualities pulling you closer to the emergent otherness oscillating your ears.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
