The symmetrical dance of “Marden” is great from the offset of Luminous Foundation‘s Afon, a tight acrylic slap of a skipping rope to a pebbling panoramic melodically over-cut, whirr-cuttled and wavering.
I’m pleasantly caught in the curling correspondence that Neil Mortimer and Mark Pilkington are brewing here, that syncopated-straight-jacket slowly loosening, envelope-slipping and jangle-frosted. Its drifting contours are reborn in a looped simplification as strummed guitar falls on through, throwing a shoegazery sparkle into the mix.
A sun-licked echo, warm with woozy human-like vocalisations getting all modular-bubbled, star-fed memory amorphously itched by subtle melodics. Swirling halflings that dynamically dart, murmur U.F.Orb-like. Blurring contours intersected in a delirious haziness — thirty-six minutes that just breeze by. The second track, “Hengist” (reminiscent of their live set at Yeovil’s Wyrd Wild West Festival last September), is an undulating helix that radiantly worms in there. Twenty-eight minutes that thoroughly compliment the previous track in Cluster-like repeats and whirring rubs that give off a mutating energy. Wurlizering colour that fills up the space with this infectious optimism.Without a doubt, Afon is one of my musical highs of 2023.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
