UNKNOWN TONE :: 3View

Unknown Tone is a burgeoning, mom and pop experimental ambient operation out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Like the best family businesses, they hand pick their stock with great taste and discernment and offer their customers both easy-to-access digital and lovingly crafted physical editions.

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Sima Kim :: Variations for Music Box

A wind-up music box states its theme and Sima Kim assays eleven variations, playing guitar and tape loops. Most are very brief, the merest whisper in the ear of an idea, while a handful stretch beyond three minutes.

Kim always writes between the lines. If you don’t listen closely—and I am not necessarily urging you to do so—you might miss it. He possesses the uncanny ability to freight the air with meaning, suspend something in it that hangs forever, long after the reverberation dies out. Kim’s variations pass in less than half an hour and each is subtle as the leaves just barely shifting on a hot summer’s day. Hearken and you will be surprised by how very adeptly the tracks shift from light to dark.

After the main program, guests Monolyth & Cobalt and The New Honey Shade provide extended, combinatory remixes. The three pieces are strong and coherent enough to warrant an EP of their own, but how nice that they are appended here.

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Karst :: Cyprea

Collaboration between Tim Diagram (Maps and Diagrams) and Mark Kuykendall (The New Honey Shade). The duo’s dual-think is dynamic, ritual complexity in a reverse coriolis effect, creating a tempest in a teapot on “Weeping Bend” that blows its top off. Opening the windows on the “Violet-Black Expansion” of the night outside, crickets groundskeep as the Milky Way spins above. Momentum is truly achieved on “Monograph of Telephora,” which both pumps and swirls with its arms straight out. “Halcyon Drift” translates the resultant delirium into some kind of comfortable inner ferment.

“Among Dead Leaves” sweeps a wand that shoots off carpets of sparks gracefully, a cerebral high, the scenery is in flux but only through your eyeballs. It was hinted at throughout, but “Bottle Gourd” really indulges a taste for retro analog spaceyness, though admirably restrained. Nearing the end, “Aged Forms” wants to tell an important story, but is pressed for time. Instead, it leaves clues. “Furrowed Doormouse” lays our heads down softly to dream about what that story might have been.

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Bengalfuel :: Stehr

This duo committed a wonderful quartet of EPs a few years ago. Biographical info always seems to mention a haunted house, and there is certainly something spectral in the unfolding of “Clock Tower” and “Sea Fog.” Stehr is a chiaroscuro study, gentle washes of shadow obscuring clear vision, enticingly. Through that glass darkly one can only just make out shapes and sounds. “Lackawanna”—the old steel mill rusting away?

The album peaks, fittingly enough, on the eighteen-minute “Peaking,” where the foggy wisps seem to have found their way into the organ pipes at the abandoned seaman’s church as the waves crest and crash like cymbals. “Cremains” is the long calm, or perhaps dazed recovery, after the storm. And we float away like driftwood on “Angela Everywhere.” Expert ambient waft. Though demure, a most illuminating suite.

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All releases are available on Unknown Tone.