British drone sculptor Paul Bradley has teamed up with the Italian musique concrete/ambient project Cria Cuervos (aka Eugenio Maggi) for this set of evocative droneworks. Moraines II uses a previous CD-R release that the two artists collaborated on as source material for the epic title track, which stretches out for almost an hour and is obviously the centerpiece of this album, which is followed by a shorter remix of the same material by the surrealist sound alchemist Andrew Liles.
The trip through "Moraines II" is a dark one, beginning with whorls of deep resonant shimmer and bowed metal tones that drift through a great void and reveal glimmers of melody and shards of glitch and digital detritus. From there, the piece moves through a series of different states, each one existing almost as a seperate piece from the rest, but flowing along a strange aural narrative. Strange amorphous soundscapes are formed from field recordings of water and melting ice, the rush and hiss of liquid subtly changed through manipulation and signal processing into alien-sounding sonic textures. Bird songs are stretched and blurred into a dreamlike haze, and draped with gauzy layers of distortion and eerie ambience. Electronic organ-like drones create stretches of dark minimal ambience, joined by recordings of rainfall, metallic growling noises, more bizarre field recording mutations, swells of ominous Lustmord-esque drift, and towards the end, the dreamlike array of sounds and drones is overwhelmed by waves of black noise.
The second track is a sixteen-minute remix of the same material by Andrew Lille, and he creates a creepy nightmare collage of tidal drones, metallic rumblings, fractured bits of piano, and warped nature sounds that's along the lines of the Nurse With Wound influenced strangeness of the rest of his body of work.
The two artists create an interesting, phantasmagoric amalgam of natural sounds and isolationist drone on this disc that'll fit in well with any collection that contains lots of Aube, Maurizio Bianchi, Coleclough, Organum, and Hafler Trio. Packaged in a matte gatefold jacket.