There is much to recommend the light yet deeply sublimated drones that constitute Moscow, WV by Accentor. There is the strongly felt sense of hush. There is the intended energy, as the album is by its authors’ description (Accentor is two individuals, Aidan O’Flynn and Jacob Thomas) the first in a dozen monthly installments. There’s the absolute negation of songness, traded for a reveling in soundness — often the standout track on a drone album is the least droney track, but no track on Moscow, WV really stands out in that regard.
And then there is the blissfully slight variation, in tone and what would be described as momentum, if the tracks — 10 in all — weren’t so self-evidently still in nature. That variety can to some extent be described as bookended by two tracks in particular, the somewhat shrill celebration of “Nelly Chapel” and the singsong lull of “Winter in Moscow II”:
O’Flynn is credited with electric viola, Thomas with vocoder, synths, and sequencer, though you would be hard put to locate self-evident instances of any of those tools, so dense and sinuous is their music.
All 10 tracks of Accentor’s Moscow, WV are available for free at accentor.bandcamp.com, but it’s in a pay-what-you-like system, so why not toss in a few bucks? What’s next from Accentor? This much we know: “All profits for the next month will got to help the victims of the recent tornadoes in the mid-west.”