S/T

LP by Jochen Arbeit ("Einstürzende Neubauten" and "Die Haut" member) & Huan (A.K.A. Víctor Hurtado from Qa’a).
18 minutes of carefully-arranged sound that call to mind the language of ancient lifeforms undersea & from the soil, lifeforms being born, flowering & dying across the sonic spectrum, from murmur & chatter to drone & pulse to shriek & howl.
Arbeit & Huan, using what sounds to be just guitar & drum machine, start the first of the LP’s two tracks with a steady heartbeat pulse & low ominous drone.
Above that backbeat, spectral steam bursts punctuate gradually-swelling guitarscapes.
The music gathers, howls, suggesting the primordial, the elemental: a vast red geyser-shot terrain that could be a world’s first hesitant centuries, or a barren dusty planet eons after wipeout.
What distinguishes this effort is its focus & sense of architecture across its relatively short running time.
There’s no shortage of kosmic guitar-driven post-Kraut prog in today’s musical landscape, but it’s rare to find that aesthetic married, as it is here, with exceptional restraint & a sense of organization.
Arbeit & Huan’s collaboration feels purposeful, departing from the merely ambient & moodscaping, sustaining interest by providing variety & detail of timbre, range, development, motif & dynamics.
The music rewards close listening, its ideas, motifs & sound-cells arriving & departing with surprising, natural flow, like exotic unicellular critters sliding in & out of a microscope’s view.
Disc was pressed in blue vinyl.

JOCHEN ARBEIT: guitar
HUAN (VÍCTOR HURTADO): guitar and drum machine

Tracklist :
1. I 9:59
2. II 8:17

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