#mark nauseef

Despite its title, Mongrels never basks in any implied complexities. The opening of “Seven Metals” relays the palimpsestic tales of crystal and wire in serial communion that typify much of the music on offer, often swirling in electronic froth. Guitars and percussion turn out to be grist for imaginative sonic mills. Both musicians are masters of colored silence, as “Lake Lushish”’s poignantly tintinnabulating opening phrases confirm, veering as they do between the calm affrontery of a single gong and the morphing tolling groans of processed process in temporary distillation. As all manner of harmonics collude, the processed episodes take over, forcing inhabitation of several simultaneous environmental spaces. Deeper listening exposes an underworld of sliding overtones, upper-registral clarity in seemingly limitless acoustical shades and variations.

At certain points, the processing becomes an integral part of the message. Listen as the interregistral drones and collected dregs informing each moment of the ironically titled “As Far as We Don’t Know” to hear the echoes, reechoes and joint statement of guitar and percussion in orchestral overlap. The piece also contains one of the album’s finest moments. At 2:07, most of the sound fades to a near background leaving only one of those myriad drones and its rhythmic ghost. It flutters in the left channel just before another vast guitar strum obliterates it, but it encapsulates all the beauty and subtlety the album has to offer. The temptation to make a Necks comparison seems justified by such a moment, a type in which that venerable trio often engages. Time passes but also hangs in a sort of balance, rhythm never eclipsing drone which in turn offers that throbbing reiteration in a kind of relief. It is as if all of the music gathered itself together in that gorgeously almost-frozen instant, and the rest is liquification in consequent.