Slow Blink & Stomachache - Slow Blink & Stomachache

 Released: March 7

An intricate and delightful two-track album,  Slow Blink & Stomachache is an album that took me a couple of listens to really break all the way down. Each track spans roughly twenty to twenty-five minutes and has quite a number of subtle layerings to them, though acted out differently. The project in its entirety was built first by an exchange of loops and sounds between the two artists, with the receiver being tasked with integrating these sounds into a their resulting composition. It’s impossible to tell what these sounds were but it doesn’t really matter, The resulting tracks feel far more complex than the use of two or three loops should warrant, but it remains engaging and possesses unlikely depth. 

The first of these two tracks is Slow Blink’s “Zoetrope,” a track that begins with gentle reversed tones and a good deal of static. These tones, it turns out, correspond to this half-broken melody that churns itself about through the runtime - a strange handful notes that feel shaky and fragile, but stay ever present and a strangely defining factor of the track. But it is the way in which these three simple tones keep morphing throughout the runtime, sometimes being succinct and upfront while other times coming to our ears through what sounds like a broken and sketchy speaker desperately in need of restoration. It feels very odd and somewhat haunting as it echoes through the otherwise soft ambiance. 

In contrast, Stomachache’s “Overcast” drowns us in the errant and distorted noises that hang over us like a cloud of sorts. It feels less odd and elegiac and more ominous. It sets the tone earlier with a fantastic amount of tape hiss and static. But even with the static becoming the dominant force in the track, there is an odd broken melody there as well. It sounds like something from a wind chime blowing in a mild wind, but the tones themselves feel so off and muted. These mutated chimes drift into the background as the noise overtakes them, but slowly make their return near the end, although now they are fully shifted and feel almost unrecognizable in the array of noises that they have morphed into.