(May 2009) Aversion Therapy is an interesting and divergent choice for Infraction’s first long player. Its creators, Draf ted by Minotaurs, are questing instrumentalists, exponents of the kind of band-based stretching-out you’d have thought alien to the Ohio imprint’s ambient and electronic-oriented remit. But those of you on Infraction neighbourhood-watch fearing the lowering of the tone by gruzzy space jams, or fretting at encroachment by real instruments and the eclipse of electronics, be reassured. While roughs of Aversion Therapy might well have been sprawling, possibly unruly, further drafting has resulted in a finely focused soft-pedalled embodiment. Instrumental sonorities may roam free from conventional meter into freer verse, harmonic waves and floating sound-clouds may be worked out into hypnotic neo-ragas with improv fluids, yet the prevailing tone set is one of expansive drift and oblique melodic strategies that should, a few frayed strands and freeform flurries notwithstanding, allay any fears of ambienteers.
Minotaurs mainstays are guitarist Ryan Wilson and Ian Fulcher, who contributes trumpet and glockenspiel. Meanwhile members of a floating cast chip in with added textures from cello and violin. Opener “Blueprints for Sunbuilding” spools out a hail of plucked and bowed strings, webs of sound solidifying then melting into steely flow, stall set out somewhere around cultivated Constellation post-rockeries, a mood and sound that may feel familiar to those acquainted with the new backwoods chamberisms and neo-folk drone of UK cottage industrialites such as Richard Skelton (aka A Broken Consort/Clouwbeck) and Seasons (Pre-din). “Sault Locks” proposes cyclical patterns of stringed things that seem to hover shyly apart, before swarming to swell and billow over the listener – not so much a Storm of Drones as a squall of tones. “Skin the Night and Fog,” a more veiled sister of the previous pluckings and bowings, plays out a psych-infused dream sequence. These three tracks forming Side A work with their own distinct harmonic and textural patterns, while seeming like movements of something overarching. Miasmic minor chord tidal flow abounds, the music’s motion determined by languorous bow-strokes, its textures by warm-prickly needles of guitar pizzicatos. Side B’s single extended track, “Sunday’s Morning Ghost,” is wrought from similar materials, but aspires to more transcendant levels, led by the celestial harmonics of Fulcher’s treated trumpet. It takes on atavistic echoes redolent of some distant Miles Davis or Jon Hassell blowback, as if viewing In a Silent Way through a post-Kosmische kaleidoscope, or channeled through Eno/Budd cathedrals to meet today’s psych-drone and ambient trajectories.
Overall, Aversion Therapy thrives on such productive tensions between genres and eras, as it does between live and recorded, spontaneous and pre-structured, making for engaging, at times thrillingly psychotropic, listening.
Aversion Therapy is due for late-May release on Infraction.
