Cane Swords – Temple Swords

Cane Swords
Temple Swords
Field Hymn Records
★★★★

Emitting what I would consider one of the most glorious album covers you could feast your eyes on, Cane Swords go beyond technological singularity as these synth composers blend the machine and your thought patterns into one. Akron, Ohio seems like as appropriate a geographical location as any to extrapolate harmony out of hardwires.

Consisting of Curt Brown and Karl Vondran, the two combine textures into a single point of concentration that burns like a laser out into the cosmos. Four songs in around 40 minutes, your only complaint should be that this album needs to be longer. You become hypnotized by its electronic gaze as the sound flows in and out of your consciousness.

The songs tend to want to go somewhere, but where that destination could be is uncertain. Their two longest songs, “Telegraph I and II,” are at the heart of this philosophy. The dominant synth structure breeds life into existence while sounds flutter about in natural symmetry. It all feels like happenstance, as if you are staring at nature in real time, but their well-contrived plot is delicately presented. And it all leads to a singular body of structure, stemmed from specific point fields.

Maybe this should have been soundtrack for a Painlevé film instead of Yo La Tengo, that is if Painlevé was an astrophysicist trying to extrapolate the mysteries of the universe. Despite its illusion of time, plan to get lost in Temple Swords sound drift. Meditate on the duo’s lucid soundscapes and by all means, don’t doubt for a second that this is one of ambient’s wonderful achievements.