After little more than half an hour, an echoing, low-slung guitar just stopping when enough, for now, has been said.
Brandon Hurtado’s music has frayed edges, like handmade paper. It feels good to the touch. It soaks up the ink of emotion but never clearly delineates it. Its ambivalence (“waviness,” he calls it) stands in bold contrast to the female evangelist Hurtado samples, preaching with absolute certainty how we should act in these, the Last Days, on “Don’t Move.”
You see Other Spaces with furred up eyes, hear it with furred up ears. Each track is a delicate piece recorded “poorly.” “Not Really There” is a prime example, pushing presumably off from the pier of Hurtado’s guitar but then drifiting aimlessly, oarlessly, into the mist, unseen but still heard. “Open Window” suggests generative music, set in motion then allowed to evolve on its own, smothered in a blanket of buzz, almost alien, almost homey. There is an everyday clandestinity to Other Spaces. It is not so much “other” than “naggingly familiar made unfamiliar.” And it just ends, after little more than half an hour, an echoing, low-slung guitar just stopping when enough, for now, has been said.
Other Spaces is available on Moreau.
