Time comes and goes on Sea Island. Frames of reference skip, stretch, lose efficacy. Illogical scopes of space-time-sound pass us by from moment to moment, ceasing to connect, ceasing to cohere. Events transpire, we are engaged, we sometimes find a groove. But a hypnosis kicks in and we discover that a massive and dense album has run its hour-plus course in what felt like… two minutes? Four days? What happened between the swells and concavities?
Gangs of orchestrated components, featuring glinting live vibraphone, build up from and eventually fade back into a smoky lurching huff on “Ahull.” A scene is set. We are entrained.
I’m remembering something about the tapping, mechanical beats on Submers. How they were reassuring, how they placed us somewhere firm along a timeline. They aren’t here. There is rhythm, but like breath, it is elastic. Everything is flattened and covered in dry snow. The rhythms converse, as if about us. When we notice them, they disappear. A real piano fades in, on “Sea Island Murders,” as if out of both guilt and pity.
Another person in the fog? A voice clocks in on “Bleeding Ink.” Just vowels, echoing off of themselves and stacking like haunted, smooth fungi on a piece of glass jutting out of white sand.
“Angle of Loll” hesitates into a syncopated heaven-space. An insistent blipping dances with its sister, the chord-pulse. The vibraphone returns. All are washed away by a sweet, far-off tone of indeterminate size and shape.
More. Non-rhythms allow rhythm some room. Sense flits in and out of focus.
Where did my days go?
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