Kuma - A Waste of All Your Light

 Released: September 1

In this early September release, Kuma brings us a two piece album that sounds like a setting of the stage for the coming winter. Both sides of this aural coins feel cold and foreboding, with long droning string and textures that swirl and stagnate in alternating swings. The first of these two tracks which bears the name of the album itself is the heavier one with deep and spacious strings that spread themselves across the entire space, slowly evolving and convoluting themselves into new pitches at a rate that feels imperceptible at times. The textures that accompany this stretched string bed feel equally cold and metallic as they rise and fall in intensity. The pure atmospherics of this track are simply amazing to hear. The way in which the sounds are stacked together creates something that feels like a wall of slowly rolling fog, gradually encompassing everything in its path. 

The second of these two tracks, “Every Man Has Three Hearts,” feels equally wintery but whether it is more dynamic or not is a mystery. It feel as though we have already been enveloped in the fog set forth by the first half and now it simply swirls around us. The strings aren’t here anymore, supplanted by a ghostly artifact of tonal drone, singing out something oddly pained as it oscillates around the scene it has set. But outside of this anchoring tonality, there are the accompaniments that sweep in and out of the foreground. I think this track stands out to me as something exquisitely more haunting that its predecessor as it evokes something a a bit unexplainable. It paints a scene of fog creeping across an uncannily still lake, with overcast skies that threaten rain but never delivers as the wind seethes slowly. It makes for such a hauntingly beautiful experience.