Mister Mattson Ogg (aka Dura) hit me with a tape a couple of months ago, and it’s dodged my Cerberus queue for… I don’t know, let’s call them “personal reasons.” It’s not that I haven’t listened to it. This, being one of the finest albums available in 2014, has been a tough one to justify pulling from my Walkman. It’s just that music like this — beautiful and extremely gorgeous drone music — is starting to seem a bit beyond words in general, or mine at the very least. What other fluffy adjectives are there that I haven’t used yet that might let you know what this sounds like? Altered Resonance is not a tape for reviewing. It’s a tape for simply being. Being on my bike. Being in my office. Being in my bed. Being on the couch next to my cat. Being at the record store. Being in front of a camp fire. Being with Jamie. It has both the emptiness and fullness of such situations. Ogg’s soft paws pawing at guitar strings and letting the transparent layers drift through one another feels like it makes up the substance of the every day, which isn’t to say that it’s boring. But neither is it necessarily interesting or exciting either. Neither background nor foreground; just ground. Wind, water, air and Earth and something else too…
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