Chris Abrahams and Mike Cooper swim in dream-like, nearly dead bodies of water, stirring them now and again only to ensure that they will not fail to swallow them. As in a dream, the proceedings are a mélange of charm and terror to which one gladly abandons oneself.
From the onset, there is a desire to stabilize flux into form. For all that, it's an album sworn to extremes, not equilibrium. The perspective is continually shifting, with instruments bubbling up out of an elusive mix of chromatic harmonies and jostling rhythms, or else several briefly coalesce, building momentum, before dissolving into fluid nuances.
When it first surfaces on "Memory Of Water", Cooper's needling guitar shows itself to have access to some singularly oblique tonal regions. It slides from simple diatonic fragments of unrecognizable folk to a gurning deconstruction, a clunky mess that does beautiful violence to Abraham's anal aesthetic.
The slow-wheeling motion of the latter's piano generally situates the disc, ensuring it doesn't drift too far from its moorings and lose touch with the narrative that underlies the disc like a strong though invisible undertow. On "Waiting For Otis", a piece with a claustrophobic intensity that speaks of enclosed space, all-enveloping darkness and the macabre play of shadows, he spools off note blips that sigh like balloons and lunar rundowns that suggest slivers of light, and illuminates the same crevices of sensibility. Taken together, then, the piece reflects an incandescent disaffection that feels disconcertingly comforting, appealing even.
And again, here ties to the ocean are seen - that strange desire to drown in it; the even stranger voluptuousness that arises when it is most potently felt. In turn, Ocean-Feeling-Like stimulates the deeper in dives into dramatic modulations, consonant harmonies and teeth-grinding dissonances that swell and recede. An unusual logic, but it makes perfect sonic sense.
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