Ancient folk guitar pickings are rent by screeds of noise, blasts of static and washes of overdriven guitar, crashing in waves defines ‘Today is the Same as Yesterday’. Arabesque motifs and jaunty shanty-like shapes shift in and out of chiming harmonics and ominous scrapes and drones. ‘Doorways Make You Forget’ swirls with mystical currents over which baritone guitar strings scratch and clang, while the title track evokes the same organic, forest evocations of recent albums by Earth.
The incantations on ‘This Summer’ are torn apart with crackling distortion and crashes of overloaded guitar, and as the album progresses, it becomes increasingly about the textures, the contrasts, the slow burn. A sonorous throb builds over the seven minutes of the darkly atmospheric ‘Psychic’ and slowly but surely, it sucks you in.
Maybe knowing old Rebetika songs helps to position this, the second ‘Rebetika’ album produced by Kyriakides and Moor, or maybe not. However, it’s interesting to note that the sleeve to ‘A Life is a Billion Heartbeats: Improvisations on Old Rebetika Songs’ provides a list of songs ‘quoted’. This is an extremely postmodern stance, although it’s significant that the musical intertextualities and layers of referencing Moor and Kyriakides build are clearly born out of an appreciation rather than a desire to parody or deface the source material. Of course, the end result is still very much a corruption, a twisting, a mutation of those songs that provide the starting point for their project. But what a fantastic and compelling mutation it is.
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