“Represents a rare opportunity to create purely for the sake of collaboration and curiosity.” That’s how the album notes describe the self-titled album from Shrunken Elvis—the new ambient/electronic project between Spencer Cullum, Sean Thompson, and Michael Ruth (AKA Rich Ruth). The trio draw “on everything from Michael Rother, Alice Coltrane, and Pat Metheny to Can, Ashra and KLF to inform their sound,” we wrote in a preview, “not to mention inspiration beyond music, be that visual art or the films of Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman.” Single ‘K-House’ showed the cinematic possibility of this style, “a track” we continued, “which takes something of the nocturnal urgency of eighties cop show theme tunes then expands its horizons with lush psych and cosmic tones.”
With the release of the album imminent on Western Vinyl, Shrunken Elvis have returned with new single ‘Marina Pt. 2’. Representative of the album’s kosmische spirit, the song highlights both the elaborate detail and expansive space of the project, its washes of ambient textures like a canvas across which the intricacies of the sound can play. The result unfurls like a widening spiral, drawing in new energies as it progresses, be that the dappled synths and lucent guitar of the opening minutes or the more discordant, rugged crescendo which starts to build around halfway through. Then, once the climax has passed, the song closes back in on itself along the same orbit. Something coaxed to life by intuition and powered by its own momentum. A moment of wonder, however brief, opened up in the world.
