Released: February 16th, 2010
Label: Graveface Records (Chicago)
Format: Vinyl Limited Edition (500 copies)
Track listing:
1 - Slow Subtraction (3:24)
2 - Grown (5:37)
3 - Pale Prophecy (4:36)
4 - Wildflower Wood (3:47)
5 - Cloud Forest (The Little Owl) (2:01)
6 - Mountain Mary (4:09)
7 - Saturation: Arrhythmia (5:04)
8 - Fever Sleep (1:24)
9 - Lake Feet (3:29)
10 - Sunburst Chemicals (2:52)
11 - Michigan Icarus (5:13)
12 - Starlight Aquatic (5:25)
Notes: I'm not an incredibly huge fan of Black Moth Super Rainbow, but when a sticky note on the vinyl at Wall of Sound mentioned it was a side project of the female member of the band, Maux Boyle (who is also one hell of a photographer), I had to give it a listen. Exactly one song later, number 332 of 500 was in my hands and I haven't stopped listening to it all day. It's delicate and stunning, hazy, trippy, and one of the prettiest albums I've heard in quite some time. Jumps over Yellow Swans "Going Places" for my favorite album of the year so far. Spacey minimalism.
"Ambient music, like Buster Bluth's wallpaper-print shirt, can recede into the background or re-form it, depending on the attention one devotes to listening or looking. Some artists deliver sounds that seem to originate from the corner of the room, not the speakers on the shelf—many of Fennesz's pieces, for example, conjure skin-crawling, stridulating insects and test listeners' willingness to let recordings bleed into "real" life.
The Seven Fields of Aphelion, a member of Black Moth Super Rainbow, attempts a gentler art in her debut. She includes seven double-sided panels of her 35mm, multiple-exposure photographs in lieu of a booklet, and the 12 tracks feature their own kind of multiple exposures. A prominent echo applied to sparse, single-note piano playing in "Slow Subtraction" focuses on the dissipation and disappearance of sound. "Saturation: Arrhythmia" moves in the opposite direction—a crescendo of swirling synthesizers only breaks into a clean, quiet conclusion after over four minutes. "Wildflower Wood," "Mountain Mary," "Michigan Icarus" and "Lake Feet," which appeared on BMSR's Falling Through a Field, share Jon Brion's occasional affinity for wistful, out-of-tune and seemingly underwater piano riffs.
The album's name, Periphery, primes listeners to relocate themselves amid the tops of the clouds and pervasive power lines in the album's photographs. Periphery's reasoned, mood-making and mood-shifting music ends on an upswing in "Starlight Aquatic," which could lead you to wade through the whole thing again. Pair this album with a 47-minute task or make listening to this 47-minute album your single task at least once."
-Alex Dimitropoulos Flagpole Magazine
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