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Barn Owl and the Infinite Strings Ensemble, "Headlands"
I have historically been quite fond of Barn Owl's work, but I sometimes find their extreme malleability a bit frustrating.  This collaboration with Ellen Fullman and Theresa Wong takes that trait a bit further than usual, as there is very little here that is immediately identifiable as "Barn Owl."  Perversely, though, that works just fine–in fact, all of the artists involved are almost completely and unrecognizably subsumed by the rich and vibrant drone music they've created.  This collaboration is so perfect and seamless that it sounds like a completely new band rather than the some of its parts.
This is a reissue of a 2010 LP that vanished quite quickly.  The album takes its name from the Headlands Center for the Arts, where it was recorded.  That fact is notable because Ellen Fullman's massive self-invented Long String Instrument requires an entire large room and several days of set-up and tuning.  I suspect it is not very easy to arrange a collaboration with her.  Significantly, Wong (a cellist), Fullman, and Barn Owl are additionally joined by producer The Norman Conquest, who contributes some acoustic guitar and moaning wordless vocals.  That guy has been popping up on a lot of great albums lately.  In fact, he might actually be the most important single force in this entire collaboration: Headlands owes a lot of its success to his unusual production and mixing.
The most striking aspect of this release is that the various instruments rarely seem to have an audible attack–everything floats and drifts without any clear sounds of notes or chords being struck.  The second big thing is that all of the instruments bleed together, but not in a murky way…more in an "organic, amorphous, and edgeless wall of sound" way.  It is very difficult to tell which sounds are coming from which instruments or which performers, aside from those emanating from Fullman.  There is nothing that can be described as conventional or "rock" about Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras' guitar work–they must have either used EBows or just been especially masterful at harnessing feedback.  Wong, for her part, seems to just pick one note to slowly and somberly bow away at.  That should make for a dull or toothless album, but Fullman's dense and vibrant oscillations tend to make the simplest things seem compelling and alive.
A drone band could not possibly hope for a better anchor than Ellen and her Long String Instrument.  Barn Owl and Wong certainly manage to weave a beguilingly shimmering and undulating haze for almost forty minutes, but it is Ellen's massive buzzing strings that give its album its gravitas and heft.  Without that heavy omnipresent thrum, this album would be too vaporous to stand out much from the many other ambient drone albums pouring into the world.  The album's sole small weakness is that there isn't much to distinguish these pieces from each other aside from small details (i.e. someone is scraping a pick across the strings at the head of the guitar near the end of "The Light"), but they certainly combine to form a transfixing, egoless, and remarkably coherent whole.  I am not at all surprised that this is a great drone album, but I was definitely caught off-guard by how beautifully and intuitively this quintet cohered into a natural-sounding single entity. This stands with the best work of any of its participants.
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