Since meeting in 2006 in Australia, experimental electronic types Lawrence English (he of Room40 fame) and Stephen Vitiello have been collaborating by e-mail, sending ideas, sketches and sounds back and forth and allowing compositions to grow organically. This process is hardly new, but rarely has it been refined to the level evident on ‘Acute Inbetweens’. The two artists’ ideas are very different, but their personalities and strengths fuse with a graceful bliss as Vitiello’s tempered field recordings and English’s peculiar modular hiccups form harmonic clouds of electronic sound. It would almost be rude to simply pass the record off as another excursion into the already well-populated drone genre; the subtle hands at work here make this a far more ‘composed’ experience than many of English and Vitiello’s peers. While the overwhelming sounds can occasionally be dissonant and confusing, repeat listens reveals carefully planned pockets of notes, and hidden, reverberating rhythms. A synthesizer record where synthesizers can barely be heard, a field recording album where the recordings are pushed into far-off realms of gaseous intensity or a drone record where the drones are far from static? ‘Acute Inbetweens’ is a deeply difficult record to classify, but one which amazes and excites in equal measure. Recommended.
via Boomkat