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Gareth Hardwick, "Aurora"
Captivating from start to finish, this latest Low Point CDR is perfect coming-out-of-winter listen. Like an especially slow thaw this disc seems to make everything crawl along t its own pace. The faded net curtain photograph cover art helping to coat the green trees in the distance in a chilly wrap of opaque fog. This one man and guitar effect pedals three tracker carves a pleasant little niche out of the currently massive drone renaissance thats sweeping the world.
Aurora is one of those albums that is easy to both sink into and to delve inside. It would probably be tempting to call it Enoesque if it wasn’t such a tremendously overused cliché already. This (nearly) 17 minute long track is split into three parts which slowly fall into each other from great heights of guitar generated hum. The gaps are impossible to spot, and these programmed breaks (although invisible) don’t really seem to have any real point as this piece of music is definitely best enjoyed as a single piece anyway. Hardwick's warbling guitar lines sound more like synth sines than axe work, flooding the speakers and double coating them in glistening signal tremors.
The warm strands here move more delicately than just a simple layering or lining up exercise, the louder the volume the deeper the record gets. Occasionally the momentum melts into a unifying single swaddle of tone, "Part 2" even manages to interconnect touches of strummed string melody to the tones in a post-rock style. This CDR may not be pulling the genre into hitherto undiscovered shapes, but Aurora is a beautiful listen nonetheless.
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