[reviews] afe090lcd
edward ruchalski: dark night

For "Dark Night" Edward Ruchalski partakes of a ceremonial study in the usurpation of motion. It's all of thirty-eight minutes, but it parts the clouds and spreads out huge black canopies of sound that absorb like nothing else.

The long sustained opening movement locks the listener into expecting more of the same, while the instruments themselves are gradually subjected to intense pressure through a continuous stream of outermost harmonics, alienated high notes and miscellaneous wood noise.

Breaks in this continuum prove devastating. Indeed, after the first two works draw to a close, the album reveals itself to be of an elliptical orbit, gliding from these looped, gaseous emissions to broad tundra's of crisply pumping electronica, more or less static drone works, and the intermittent flirtation with modern composition.

During the fifth composition, an emotionally exposed piano melody retains a calm level of expression that, against a guitar, distorted and coated in liquid metal, seems utterly divine.

Rebecca Klossner adds the whisper of singing bowls to the light spume of textures on part seven, but it never seems tangential or imprudent, so intelligently judged is the albums beauty.

[Max Schaefer]