Lovingly presented as two clear 10” vinyl records wrapped up in Mars Wellink‘s artwork which graces the gatefold sleeve in suitably transcendantly minimal style, Amid Zero Echo swells up and into four sides of the most immensely practised drones imaginable. On this occasion, Thomas Dimuzio uses ultimately unrecognisable guitar-derived sounds as the base source material through which to seemingly condense the entirety of the cosmos into around an hour or so of sidereal time; but relativistically-speaking, this album seemingly fills up so much more than the quotidian ticking by of minutes on the clock and grooves in the record might usually indicate.
Well-travelled psychonauts will doubtless feel at home as each disc unfolds and is flipped ritualistically from side to side to side on the turntable platter. Thomas Dimuzio has been at this sort of thing for a couple of decades now, and his plentiful expertise and experience is evident throughout Amid Zero Echo as the dynamics seize control of the heard environment in a way that only a broad-spectrum aural bath such as this can achieve. Diving into this record is like tuning in to the background hum of the universe with the gain turned up to eleven; even better is letting the sound wash over, around and then ultimately giving in and absorbing its presence until the music is almost viscerally inside the body, regulating its processes and eventually allowing the motion to modulate breathing and pulse rate.
Amid Zero Echo provokes a feeling of floatation-tank stasis punctuated by moments of revelatory bliss as nerve endings are stimulated and caressed, the ears becoming a portal to the sublime. There’s a reason this kind of all-encompassing soma bath music was dubbed isolationism back in the Nineties, after all – once embarked upon the journey, it becomes increasingly difficult to perceive, and more importantly, feel, the world beyond the sound, while simultaneously, paradoxically, becoming more keenly aware of the totality of existence.Such immensity may not be for everyday listening, perhaps, unless the daily routine includes perching on the brink of an endless void gazing out in blissful contemplation of the vastness of space while time is held in abeyance and the allotted twenty-four hours stretch, morph and become flexible. In which case, there would be little need of Amid Zero Echo‘s services in any event; but without benefit of such proximity to satori, this LP will just have to do instead.
-Antron S Meister-
