Having explored aural terrain closer to Earth as half of the drone/doom duo Barn Owl, Evan Caminiti has been gradually pruning back the humanoid elements of his craft to sketch out a vision of solo electronic performance — weighted thick with whirring synth figures, cavernous percussion, and peals of static noise. The multi-instrumentalist has previously sculpted sessions from strategies like Fripp-core guitar layering (see the radiant Dreamless Sleep), and dub-influenced delay manipulation (see Barn Owl’s latest, V), both of which factor into his newest solo paradigm to some degree. While we hear no overtly recognizable guitar tones in tracks like “Arc,” from his new album Meridian, the recurring pads and echoed tubular bell voices that fold onto themselves in the haze of his claustrophobic mix transmute the density and chordal complexity of a six-string performance into abstract formations that betray little trace of hands-on-something input. Liberated from the conventions of genre or instrumentation, Caminiti’s mind races through a darkened expanse flecked with markers of alien geometry and post-Brutalist architecture — and we tread a few paces behind him, watching figures emerge from nothingness. Montreal-based artist Sabrina Ratté contributes a stream of surreal visual synthesis to accompany “Arc,” which pulses in loose concordance with the track’s peaks of activity. Ratté smears matrices and grainy textures over central figures that phase and mutate before our eyes, alternately decaying into absence or surging up into flashes of day-glo brilliance. Her feed contains too many details to glean in one sitting, as her strata of colors and shapes compound into increasingly intricate permutations.
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