Spencer Park, 2011, DD EP, 11m 54s, £name your price
http://yonks.bandcamp.com/album/yonks-marluk
This is the second release from Yonks, hence the name. What do you mean you don’t know what marluk means? It means ‘two’ in no less than three languages. Admittedly they’re only spoken in Greenland, but still.
The guitar plus electronics duo continue to plough their distinctive and highly listenable furrow, with three more tracks of (I think) highly processed guitar and programmed beats. There are bits that are clearly guitar, and bits that are clearly percussion: there also many bits that could have been made by any of a number of means. Sonic invention is central to this project, but never in a way that is abrasive or overly dissonant: even quite aggressively angular interventions of distorted guitar are subsumed into the broader atmosphere, which is one of slightly eerie, spatial suspension. There is melody, and even a kicking beat (on ‘Yonks 7’), but the emphasis is always on texture, on a succession of mad sounds going off in your ear, organised to express a relaxed but witty, cool and slightly loopy aesthetic.
I don’t know what Lextrical sounds like alone, but the other half of the project, Matt Stevens, has a distinctive voice as a guitarist, which comes through very clearly, despite the dissimilarity from his work under his own name or with The Fierce And The Dead. This is a Good Thing, because he’s a fine player. These three tracks are a gentle feast of creativity, floaty atmosphere and varied texture: an excellent concept, beautifully realised.
Oliver Arditi 