Along with the recently reviewed album by Vierzig Skizzen, VSF favs Lily Tapes & Discs also released a new split from Cla-ras and Ben Lovell’s Lung Cycles, the seventh in their series of double releases.
The A-side belongs to Cla-ras, a new project based in Providence Rhode Island, and one that seems tailor made for Lily Tapes. The only track, ‘I Could Taste Iodine in the Drinking Water’, is almost 20 minutes of subtly affecting drone and guitar, the soundtrack for a lonely afternoon in a bare room. The tape’s only vocals emerge after around seven and a half minutes, a spoken word piece adapted from a work by Mary Shelley, which begins, “The picture that I present to you is peaceful and human and you must feel that you can deny it only in the oneness of power and cruelty.”
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The flip side belongs to Lung Cycles, the first release from Ben Lovell’s project since 2016’s reissue of On Being Lumpy, and the first new material since 2015. It comprises of three tracks that are every bit as pretty as we’ve come to expect from Lung Cycles, what the blurb describes as “a loose constellation of slow meditations on quick ideas, left alone to simmer while we wait for the room to heat up.”
‘Following Me Up the Stairs’ is built on a spare and repetitive guitar line which creates a ruminative sense of calm, before ‘hottest day of the year so far’ grows out of subtle textures to become a strangely emotional guitar song, voices from a far off TV adding to the atmosphere. All that’s left then is finale ‘Smoke column (Jonathan)’, which feels like what remains after the release has burnt itself out, ashen grey and vaguely ominous, part meditative guitar song and part field recording. However you want to describe it, it’s undeniably beautiful.
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You can get the Cla-ras / Lung Cycles split now from the Lily Tapes and Discs Bandcamp page.
