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alog



Here's what I wrote on Alog for the Wire (apologies for the wordiness).  I
wrote a very *different* kind of review under vaguely altered circumstances,
but on review the next morning it wasn't fit for a spoof on Surrealist
automatic-writing, much less in the hallowed pages of the Wire.  ;)
  

Alog, Red Shift Swing (Rune Grammofon)

One never knows quite what to expect from a Rune Grammofon release, but it's
a good bet that it will resemble a language-lesson record - one for a sonic
dialect, half-invented and half-imagined.  Previous CDs by Biosphere,
Deathprod and Supersilent have suggested both Ambient and Improv as likely
signposts for the label.  Alog - a duo made up of Dag-Are Haugan
(Mykedroner) and Espen Sommer Eide (Phonophani) - mouths bits of both,
lengthening the vowels and cracking the consonants in a strange new language
that's impossible to translate.

Fusing segments cut from improv sessions with field recordings and
clattering percussion, Alog weaves reeds, strings and found sounds into a
loose, drifting fabric.  Though Alog's textures are bound to invite certain
comparisons with Tortoise, these pieces breathe in a way the Chicagoans'
compositions never have.  Gastr del Sol and even Tony Conrad figure here as
well, in the spidery acoustic guitars and entropic strings.  A nominally
Ambient field of guitars, drone, and magnetic resonance, it's shot through
with the "impurities" that bring it to life - splinters of jazz (rollicking
drums, sprinting bass), a marital spat for modems, the odd acid-rock
bassline, white-hot and propulsive, and loops, loops, loops. Scraps of TV
soundtrack peel from the walls, and voices churn in nostalgic eddies.
Miraculously, given the blur of information, there is a structure buried
deep beneath the flow.

Red Shift Swing opens up over time; what at first seems an undifferentiated,
if porous, wall of sound reveals hidden spaces in the cavities, in which
hide a multitude of music boxes, all ticking away on their own time.  Like
acoustic orchids, these epiphytic sounds breathe their own air, shouldering
together but brightly independent of all the forces around them.  The entire
album ababble with mixed metaphors, it creates a beautifully bastard tongue.
Organic in the truest sense.