Customer Reviews

Regions Less Parallel-Early Works & Rarities

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Regions Less Parallel collects Auburn Lull's Dual Group EP (a split EP with Mahogany), the North Territorial/Van der Graaf 7", soem compilation-only tracks, along with a few new tracks.

The new tracks are largely there to create a flow between tracks (think: Rising Meriddean/Sinking Meriddean off of Cast from the Platform.) and while enjoyable, aren't really much to talk about.

The Dual Group EP tracks are stunning in that they manage to out-slowdive Slowdive themselves. "Watching" is truly the highlite of the disc.

The North Territorial/Van der Graaf tracks are good, but largely experimental and probably resemble ambient music moreso than Auburn Lull's other releases.

Lastly, the compilation tracks are quite good. They're culled from sessions from both of the band's albums, Alone I Admire and Cast from the Platform. While they would've been out of place on their parent albums, they're still quite good.

As far as compilations go, the material is exceptional. My only disappointment was that the new tracks weren't really anything other than incidental music. However, compiling the rare, vinyl-only Dual group EP and the North Territorial single on CD make it worth buying.

No one carries on an internal dialogue about typical instrumentation that's come to be universally associated with conventionally arranged songs being used in a manner that keeps them from developing in a traditionally linear fashion when listening to music created with bass, drums, guitar, and keyboards, especially when it's being done in a way that manages to isolate the sounds those instruments produce and deconstruct them until they've become spatially expansive, overlayered, and floating on a bed of ambience.

And that includes me. I just knew that Auburn Lull produced music that isolated and teased the most intimate, infinite level of atmosphere out of each sustained note, instruments processed heavily through effects racks and miked in such a way as to lend a vast, mosaic-like texture to their sound, which has evolved over the course of three full-length releases to the point where at least the formative structure of a song can be discerned beyond the enormous sense of sonic depth and progression-in-stasis. But I really had to spend a fair amount of time just analyzing what made the features and elements of this band's output so appealing before I could do a passable job of articulating why.

"Regions Less Parallel: Early Works And Rarities" does a fantastic job of tracing this evolution, from their first diaphanous, languidly recorded singles to the saturative, richly enveloping wash of ambience characterizing the material left off of "Alone I Admire" and "Cast From The Platform" which began to point very tentatively in the direction of traditional, formatively constructed songs that in actuality are only united in melody through massive, singular, overlapping, immersive tones.

And for me, "Regions Less Parallel" stands well on its own as a cohesive release in its own right; with so many of the percussive flourishes, chiming bells, and strings to augment these tracks, it has the feel of a full-length release, if not the actual content. As with every other Auburn Lull CD, I highly recommend snagging a copy.