barnett & coloccia: weld

Faith Coloccia and Alex Barnett return to Blackest Ever Black with their second duo album, Weld; working with synthesizers, effected vocals, raw electrical noise, field recordings, EVP techniques, tape manipulation, and drum machines to create a music at once lucid and mystic. Its songs embody various experiential philosophies and objectives: searching for the sacred in the forgotten and supposedly useless; exploring the meaning of "natural"; listening for the pulse of the ancient; using technology both to materialize memory and to dream a folklore for a future age. Coloccia and Barnett's ambition is apparent early on in the stately, medievalist keyboard/choral poetics of "Truth Teller," moving through the agitated wormhole techno of "Dreamsnake," to the white light-emitting, near-symphonic plainchant of "Healer." The zero-hour synth pulsations of "Blight" are first interrupted, then engulfed, by an extra-terrestrial broadcast of piercing bell and glass-tones; "AM Horizon" is pitched bewitchingly between Prophet-5 pulp futurism and earthbound, atavistic dread; the baroque harmonic sequence of "Agate Cross" disintegrates at its very climax, cooling and dissipating into a deep star-field of pure tone. "Ash Grove" and "Rose Eye" are exhilarating exercises in contemporary musique concrète; complex timbral constructs in which Coloccia's disembodied glossolalia, swooping strings, and other nameless sonic spectra conspire to evoke extra-dimensional space and the highest spiritual drama. Weld speaks its own distinctive dream-language, but it comes highly recommend to anyone enamored of the brittle sci-fi synth-scapes in Caroline K's Now Wait for Last Year, the amorphous electronics of Beatriz Ferreyra's work, Conrad Schnitzler's more gothic moments, and even the gravest metaphysical reckonings of a Stockhausen or a Rózmann.