Freq (UK)

In pursuit of an “acoustic” truth, Taylor Deupree has ditched his usual hi-tech shenanigans for a more hands-on, cut’n’splice approach, a back to basics attitude that has created a rewarding series of skeletals. A pearlescent cascade, the accompanying photographic book attempts to pin down and complement the stripped-backed intimacy on offer here.

Those stumbled sonics puckering the tactile purr of a cassette recorders innards, each track a slow incubation of decaying instrumentation. Droplets of piano keys and glockenspiel opening up yawning meditatives in the listener, blurring narratives sucking you into a spherical glow of the cosmos. At certain points the background’s rub interjecting, scribble-skating beneath, throwing a echo of ghostly imperfection to its curling contours, the crackling scorch of static jivering gymnastically with the acoustic blurs, a ciphered scar of some distant star. Other times this chaffing candour is like a match-head continually kept in the pubescence of combustion, thistle(ing) the expanding chime of the upper registers. A gentle entanglement dismantling the corrosive choke of urgency.

Weird little wormholes in the fabric appear, schisms spin in a dazed sense of melody, subtle loopings in which things seem to wander out of the space they inhabit, then shift elsewhere on the faint memories of their former selves, lingering dreamily before bending subserviently to the silence that surrounds. An album of delicate depth of field shifts – “Autum” (missing the n), with its canopy calls and twinkling tremors, falling in a Camus-like insomnia of misshapenness. The flinty sparks and glassy rolls of the last track burning sulphurous into your consciousness — who says you have to shout to be heard?