Greydisc 2017
The Line To Three
When worlds collide in the absence of a witness, this is the sound they make.
Two most original guitarists, Kastning and Wingfield, continue their progress into the great unknown – and this direction could be the only thing the two have in common. The more interesting it gets, then, because the artists wouldn’t be able to repeat their own, let alone somebody else’s, route even if they wanted to. That’s why, in terms of abstract approach to emotionality, “The Line To Three” couldn’t be more different from "Eleven Rooms" that preceded it, three installments of “Invisible Landscapes” which run a thread through the record making the gently wailed intangibility rather effective, a suspended event of sorts. As Wingfield’s atonal slivers feed electric charge to Kastning’s strum, and former’s six strings tease feedback out of the latter’s classical fifteen, eerie calmness descends upon the listener, although there’s also hidden anxiety in such an urban meditation whose well-textured wisdom is revealed in the epic “Momentary Books Of Leaving” – a solemn, funereal-to-belligerent, aural analog of peripheral vision.
Still, it’s tracks with Kevin concentrating on the left side of a piano keyboard and Mark focusing on the upper part of his fretboard that allow the duo explore their dynamic in full. This juxtaposition of the two instruments and the near-silence between their registers, alternately converging and separating, is where elusive, if folk-informed, melodies breathe and come to life on “The Gathering Of Shapeless Form” and “All The Clouds Around You” as mesmeric forays into some other world – one much more exquisite, and empty, than ours. An introvert’s paradise? Perhaps.
Yet percussive ripples peppering another split picture, “A Nameless Unfolding” which pushes the envelope towards free jazz, bring nuclear tension to the guitars’ tangle. There are seemingly random chords thrown in to counterbalance Kastning’s 30-string Contra-Alto beatific beast, while “The Line To Four” – the album’s finale defying its own title – dissolves Wingfield’s avant-garde reserve in sheer pleasure. As a result, surprises are aplenty here: not easy to possess, they’re the receptive ear’s ultimate prize.
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