Loving the gorgeously tactile, gristled nature of this new double helping from Cindytalk, the sculpted ambiguity of the cover art flowing beautifully into those slow droning diamonds of the opener, “Embers Of Last Leaves”. An image that seems to animate to the immersive physicality of its sonics. An eighteen-minute opus, eroded and sparsely punched, sizzling abstractions bathing in your mind’s eye, snaked in eerie chorals that seem to spill that figurative blur in ectoplasmic tendrils.
As if possessing a fevered otherness of Francesca Woodman, the artwork’s suggestive shapes feel texturally tethered to the audio’s pitted surface – artwork and sound a collaborative whole, each feeding the other. As much as I love the lyrical bite of those early years, Cindytalk’s introspective canvas has grown infinitely richer in the succeeding years, emboldened by a desire to delve deeper, ridding itself of conventional restraints.
The stark nature of the sonics here excite, driven on an undulating open chord, the epidermis meditatively fracturing in fingerings of forlorn. Inking that invisible thread, the dark elegance of “Eien No Yūyake” – the title of which I think translates from Japanese as “Eternal Sunset” — aptly radiates in soft explosive scatterings that starlight beautifully against that wind-born melody which ribbons on through, dimensionally dined on in nibbling electro-statics. A rather majestic creation that pulls at the submerged vocals within a mechanical rub of “Tower Of The Sun”. An occultist flavour of fleeting glances thrashed in the brittle swoosh of some clanky apparatus as a worn melody clings on the track’s moth-eaten hem.Continuing on from Cindytalk’s 2022 release Subterminal, this soft and languid ambience holds you to its investigative itch; psychologically latches. The pointillist pour of “For Those Eyes, Shadows Of Flowers” a granulated rub of decaying vistas, claustrophobically combed, rotting away in an outstretched roar that’s electrocuted and azure-smeared.
Like some scarred interplanetary surface internally spinning, the decaying beauty of the sonics bewitch, root deep like a murmuring mirror as the oxide shivers of “My Sister The Wind” scuff your senses with a gritty otherness gilded in gouging transaction. A phantom-filled dirty window on the soul, billowing out in motorised shunt and noisy rupture. Loving the slow and sumptuous brilliance of it all; if this were a book, the pages would be texturally spiralling, a weathering of whirring cogs (unlocking some buried truth). A moody landscaping that you just have to drink in; the bleak grandeur of which the lightly puckered diode dance of “Invisible Adventure” futilely pushes against, before the album closes on the haunted air of “I See Her In Everything” that expands on the prevailing. Its wax cylinder crackle flowing with an undulating choral and clattering percussives, a density that’s suddenly lost to a softly brushed singularity, atomised on the distant horizon.Textural whisperings of the highest order.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
