This is the second High Aura’d release this year for Cleveland-based composer John Kolodij, and he also released the really lovely Gemini Sisters record early in 2018.  Like that Gemini Sisters recording, If I’m Walking builds songs out of watery, indefinite washes of sound, sudden brightly focused elements and oblique references to traditional folk and blues. The main difference is that Gemini Twins uses heavily processed vocals as a route to unearthly aura; these cuts rely almost entirely on guitar.

As in Daniel Bachman’s The Morning Star, American primitive style picking flits and filters through a hall of mirrors, sounding like a dream of the blues, a half-corroded memory of folk music, as it threads through glowing unreal landscapes. As with the Bachman, the real world occasional makes a cameo appearance. A hint of sirens keens in the side B, “I’m Whispering” though miles and miles away.

This is not a record you can rush through. On side A, you wait four minutes and 36 seconds for the first unaltered strum, but it is well worth it. The guitar tone is hauntingly clear and lucid, like Hisato Higuchi. With time, it gains weight and friction and dissonance, a rasp of conflict in two overlayered melodic lines. And then, it pulls in on itself, folding back into a sea of drone, an inchoate tide of tone lapping up around guitar sounds and slowing covering it over.  

“I’m Whispering,” the one with piano, lets high notes ice through the gloom. They ring luminously amid smoke banks of soft amorphous hum. The effect is not quite classical, but nowhere near folk either, serene and simple like Max Richter’s piano compositions. In the last third of the piece, a breezy, bucolic guitar enters in, changing the piece entirely and making it more accessible. Yet even as the flurry of folk-picked melody makes you comfortable, a strange echoing drone brings on a chill. The music is lovely, but not quite what it seems.