Silent Land Time Machine - Summer 2011 Tour EP [Album Review]

Summer 2011 Tour EP/SLTM

To tide us over before the early 2012 release of his second full-length, the one-man bedroom-recording project that is Silent Land Time Machine released a batch of six songs under the name Summer 2011 Tour EP. Each piece begins from a single point - a plinked piano melody, a smirch of guitar feedback, a soft drum beat, an open space of whooshing silence - and builds upwards from that point, layering doleful viola, violin, cello, accordion, wordless vocals, percussion, ambient found sound and various other electronics until the original source is obscured in the electro-acoustic maelstrom. The results are haunting ear worms that feel ethereal and nearly fleeting, like you're remembering these songs as they bloom into existence.

Silent Land Time Machine's music abuts that of a few different artists, without ever landing squarely in previously staked out territory. There are gentle nods to post-rock instrumentalists like Thee Silver Mt. Zion and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and all the tracks have an analog warmth reminiscent of Black Moth Super Rainbow. The way that each song moves forward in a directly linear pattern, layering recursive loops into a hypnotic whole that's the sum of everything before it, is a bit like a murkier version of Panda Bear.

But it's hard to pin this stuff down, which feels like the point. The man behind Silent Land Time Machine keeps the details of his project slightly mysterious, perfectly suiting the music. There's a delicate tenuousness to the songs on this EP that strongly rewards a blissed out surrender of a listening experience. The tinkly piano melody, plucky banjo and ambient static warmth that introduce the first track, "Even Floating Islands Fall", immediately invite the listener in. From there, the song becomes increasingly busy, rushing onward until it bursts into a clearing of clattering percussion, backwards guitar loops, openhearted synth and what sounds like a theremin. It could be the soundtrack to yearning and then receiving.

"Remembering Names" begins with two minutes of quiet atmospherics, before a soothing back-and-forth violin melody emerges. The song consists of this three-note melody floating on top of a billowing ether of noise; it's a sign post at the crossroads between naive composition and musique concrète-style sound manipulation, where Silent Land Time Machine's music exists. Many of the sounds on the EP are acousmatic in the sense that they seem to emerge from behind a veil of electronic noise or they're multi-tracked from different mediums, so pinpointing where they came from is impossible. The layers of sounds in each song seem to naturally and yet unpredictably spawn new sounds - it's like the aural equivalent of a time-lapse video of a plant growing.

Elsewhere, "Kissa" brings together a glitchy electronic figure, soaring wordless vocals and an underwater drum beat, while "An Own to One's Room" sounds like backwater carnival music, its pleasing piano melody eventually succumbing to a minor, sinister version of itself. "≠Automata" is a blippy percussive exercise, and "Dealing With Doubt" concludes the album with some beautiful orchestral loops backed by ghostly ambient sounds and electronic whirs.

You can pick up the EP (at any price you care to pay), as well as Silent Land Time Machine's first album &hope still, on bandcamp. He'll also make an appearance on Brainclub Vol. 2, the compilation LP series curated by Pure X's Jace Jenkins and Survive's Kyle Dixon.

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