Disquiet

Listen through the noise. Listen through, as if trying to see something hinted at off in the distance, through fences and trees, past throngs of people, well after dark. There’s something out there, for certain. And there’s something in here, here being the title cut of Castor Volant (by Darcin, born Nicolas Dion), a half hour of pixel sludge — and that’s a compliment, for the effort required to make something this thick and threatening out of something so infinitesimal as digital pulses — buried within which are fragments of melody (MP3). The melody arrives as brief snippets of what sound like backward-masked riffs, tense little moments that embody hesitation. Not only are they brief and quiet, but the backward sound has this nostalgic tinge. Toward the end of the half-hour-plus “Castor Volant,” the foreground noise recedes, giving those little rifflets a few minutes for the listener to get full sense of their fragile beauty.

The second track is tough listening for an altogether different reason. It’s titled “Bonus Piano,” that piano — really piano by association, more like little individual synthesized tones — is rarely heard for more than a handful of quick notes at a time, before deep silence intercedes. This proceeds for over 10 minutes (MP3), during which the smattering of notes takes on the feeling of some indiscernible message.

Closing track “Bonus Process” is a slow-dawn drone, like a church organist has gone Zen, and is just digging the sine waves of a single held chord (MP3).

Get the full set and more info at the estimable label No Type: notype.com.