Originally released by Blackest Ever Black.

Working with synthesizers, affected vocals, raw electrical noise, field recordings, EVP techniques, tape manipulation and drum machines, Barnett + Coloccia’s special facility with the interpenetrating mechanisms of time, space and tone yields a music at once lucid and mystic.

The songs on Weld embody a series of 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 materialise memory and to dream a folklore for a future age.

Weld's sonic ambition is evident early on: within fifteen minutes it has transported us from the stately, medievalist keyboard/choral poetics of ‘Truth Teller’, through the agitated wormhole techno of ‘Dreamsnake’ (preview left), to the white-light-emitting, near-symphonic plainchant of ‘Healer’. As these piece’s titles suggest, this is an album steeped in myth and ideas of personhood that are pre-modern, or at least exist outside of modernity. Accordingly, Coloccia and Barnett’s high-fidelity compositions and edits are alchemical, upsetting obvious chronologies of change: ‘Blight’’s zero-hour synth pulsations 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; ‘Agate Cross’’s baroque harmonic sequence disintegrates at its very climax, cooling and dissipating into a deep starfield 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 we would certainly recommend it to anyone enamoured of the brittle sci-fi synth-scapes in Caroline K’s Now Wait For Last Year, the amorphous electronics of Beatriz Ferreyra’s recent work, Conrad Schnitzler’s more gothic moments, and even the graver metaphysical reckonings of a Stockhausen or a Rozmann.

Produced by Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O)))) and mastered by James Plotkin, the album is available to order on vinyl LP and digital formats.