Mark Bradley - Absolution (Basses Frequences CD-R)

Here's another platter for your brain matter, but only if you feel like squishing it to ooze and letting it have a looksy around the premises from the floor. Mark sent me this one a little bit ago, and it's been a delayed delight, especially what with the incoming chill and overextended thrill associated with teaching in the winter. Perfect stuff for elimination of all things detrimental.

Mark's hardly a newcomer though, as he's been popping stuff out for a while on labels like Reverb Worship, Blackest Rainbow and the way-back reviewed Existential Cloth stuff. Which means this is a tried and true tactic, and little could be thought of as trieder or truer than Bradley's laser beam ambiance. With crystal clear precision, Bradley let's it all slip in and out of focus with little regard for the fuzzy affect so often opted for in the scene. Instead you just get shifting planes of lunar lines, lunges of transparent diamonds that reflect so much light that they vanish as quickly as their image gets back to your eye. Split between four tracks, each as iridescent as the next, the whole album virtually melts upon touch. From the shards of "Evolving" to the gentle treatment of vibrato on "Harmonium," the whole work feels far more about the space you're sitting in than the sounds effect. Just let it spill on over and have a go at some manna. It's all for the taking.

The longest work here is the third offering, "Unison," which shimmies around some vacuous nexus like magnetic quarks lured in to inter-dimensional portals. Long and slow, the thing hardly lies still--it just stills the mind while it switches modes with glorious acuity. In the 5th dimension, these pieces are downright quick. Just slows down in translation. "Absolute" closes in satellite managerial moves, blipping and shredding its way out of the steel and into the black. More in line with the Old New Age than the New one, this stuff rests squarely on its blankets of sound--I dare say it's downright cozy in there too. Killer tin package on this one as well.