This album of quiet, delicate guitar ambience is not the first thing most would expect from a trio of such heavy music luminaries as Stephen O'Malley (Burning Witch, Khanate, Sunn), James Plotkin (Old, Khanate, Atomsmasher), and Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, Hydra Head Records). It's not completely out of the blue, though, if you consider the quieter interludes on Isis' Celestial and Old Man Gloom's Seminar II, or the bulk of Plotkin's solo releases, for that matter. In any case, this is not the work of vacationing dilettantes, as the array of feedback drones, textural scrapes, speaker-rattling sub-bass frequencies, and other hard-to-describe noises heard on this disc go beyond the standards of garden-variety guitar noise making to create unsettling and unpredictable tracks. Those looking for melodies and/or a steady beat (or even the abstract heaviness of something like Sunn) may want to steer clear, but as sparse, guitar-based, dark ambient music goes, this is good stuff.
© William York /TiVo