Sundrips formed last year, but according to Discogs, Just A Glimpse is already their 14th release (I’m pretty sure a few are being left out, too). To anyone not embedded in the currently thriving underground tape scene, such hefty output would lead to two simple conclusions: the two young dudes who make up Sundrips, Ryan Connolly and Nick Maturo, are either prolific masters of their craft or lazy con-men, content to wipe each other’s asses for limited-edition shit-stain releases (that will inevitably sell out within a week). But while most listeners would guess the latter to be true, I think such rapid production says something about not only music consumption, but also Sundrips’ approach to music-making in general: the values of song-based music don’t easily apply to the music of Sundrips.
To start, Sundrip’s music doesn’t feel tossed-off. When the first pulses of sound wash ashore in Just a Glimpse, it’s with an assured beauty and steady hands. I’m not left thinking about expensive gear or which effect pedal is being used, as is often the case with atmospheric ambient or drone music. Most of the album mirrors a simple sound wave’s continuous arches, with each track adopting a different rhythmic sweep. “Awash” flows along with a steady pulse, like an elevated, sunburned heart-rate, while closing track “When” bubbles at a snail’s pace, using a higher-pitched synth sound to punctuate the wave’s continuous rising and falling.
This methodical wave pattern is partly tied to the filter effect and modulation most recognizable on vintage analog synthesizers. With the filter at its lowest, only the lowest frequencies are allowed to come through, most of which are inaudible to the human ear. As you slide the filter up, the wave’s more audible higher frequencies trickle in. When seen on a macro scale, this pulsing of frequency appears in most music, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Just a Glimpse is a meditation on such a motion, even if unintentionally.
Meditation, in fact, is probably the best way to describe Sundrips’ aesthetic as a whole: their music deals with abstraction, emphasizing a certain approach within a broader sphere and simply lingering there. The harmony on display is familiar to any Western ear — consonant, moving in circles — but when taken out of the block formulas of song-based musics, which these chords have been shoved into for a long, long time, the same harmonic range takes on an entirely different feel. Musicians from Erik Satie to Cluster to Brian Eno realized this power of abstraction when they pioneered ambient music, and it’s precisely this methodology — in which value is placed on the approach, not the “song” — that paves the way for such prolificacy.
Sundrips are not musically lazy. They’ve simply found an approach worth exploring over and over again, repeated for infinity.
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