![]() ![]() The clang of some unknown instrument rebounds in deepest reverb like King Tubby’s Greenwich Town echo chamber rebuilt to the size of the Milky Way. The title track, “The Grain,” is pure aural clear air turbulence with intermittent roars of cosmic debris down the chute sometime later combining with a tolling bell tone as a light mist of white noise rain falls gently in the distant. Meanwhile, long-imploded galaxies finally reaching a Hubble telescopic recording device on Earth are transferred to operate as the slowest possible rhythm track.Or at least: as a contrast to all the eternal ebb and flow at play. Their controlled tones of wavering bass frequencies disturb the foundations of any nearby structure while drones emanating as if from a gigantic stone hurdy-gurdy grind out sonic starstorms until both weave together into a massive, though massively quiet, interplay of forces akin to a 600,000,000x magnification of the sound of the magnetic field of two 50 tonne magnets chained together to their opposing sides. But I do know that the interplay here is magnetic and majestic, its balance is intuitively felt and the placement of everything is scored perfectly upon the surface of the heavy rag content paper blitz tissue of reality while a fierce economy underlies it all. Or what instruments (musical or otherwise) were employed, or if it was just easier for them to project it all via ESP onto a hard drive as a lossless FLAC file. Make that eternity in 67 minutes, 32 seconds and you have “The Grain,” with that Blakean grain of sand microscopically enlarged to the size of a planet with the diameter of a sun - but perceived aurally, not visually. The first lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” relate more than a little to this transcendental perspective: Either way, it is excellent use of electricity and could quite possibly qualify as a future ancestor of Music of the Long Descent Into Now with its virtual soundtracking of the transit of the shortest measurable unit of time, Planck Time (the time required for light to travel, in a vacuum, a distance of 1 Planck length 1 Planck length is about 10 −20 times the diameter of a proton) as translated into a consistently, quietly and ever-changing slog for an hour-plus. ![]() Not only because this might be the music of the Long Now as posited by Brian Eno in the late 20th Century, but also that of eternity rendered in time-lapse frames condensed into a mere 67 minutes, 32 seconds. How the passage of something so slow can still be perceived as actually moving - let alone having been specifically produced and created that way - is astonishing. But on their third and latest release, “The Grain,” their footing is higher and firmer than ever. Slomo is Holy McGrail and Howard Marsden, two spatialnauts who’ve been effortlessly traversing that slippery slope of electronic music armed only with hyperawareness, pneuma, and keen detailing alone. “The Grain” is BIG and Slomo IS slow motion at the speed of slug trudge over transcontinental salt flats, leaving a cosmic trail of sonic slime that suggests symbolic reenactments of ancient myths animated only by light and shadow flickering on the walls of caves, mountains ranges, surfaces of natural structures, entire continents, and in your mind. ![]()
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