Meridian
The distinctive sides of Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti’s music as the duo Barn Owl has operated contrary wise in player/opponent musical identity in the past. Where Porras delved deep with distortion on the guitar, Caminiti wandered across the whole range like a star from afar. This, Evans second LP in a year’s breadth solo, extends that mantric grip ever further, and it’s handled like all the inclusive records in terms of quality.
The music on the release is a soft centred, organically driven heater device for your veins. It glows like a nightlight on the edge of a hotel balcony, melodies entrapping the chill of the night of which the sounds seem so suited. The sound taken itself to the night then I would love for a while, but the universality of Barn Owl and serrational solo endeavours always lay in a surreptitious, deft gravity, and the bric-a-brac fragile frontiers emplacement creates an excellent intoxicating layering potion. On third track ‘Collapse’ for example the harmonies are well rehearsed before being recorded, generative counterpoint couplets which gravitate upward through rigorous polymorphous polysynths shed their coated skin like a makeup artist downgrading from dolled up dollar bill dominance into something altogether earthed, and weighted by the pull of music’s environmentally synaesthetic holographic projection between ‘what could be’ and Caminiti.
Evan reached similar musically altruistic searches on his dreaming themed LP some time ago. Like a dream, but not because of any minor, we struggle to remember colloquial form, a distinct 16 bar resolve that dreams always lack as they are aquatic nodules and modulations of memory functionality. The purpose of a meridian however is that it issues intent and information with an alpha/omega mindset, or to be clearer, a confluetic twinning of a sources two sides, two opposites, two intrinsically separate entities of matter. With the same time in sound to focus on integrality of synthesis like Tim Hecker and ASC, are solution on night’s bent toward sleep paralysis – or aurally, ambient atomicity, rarely is right for Evan. For fans and newcomers ‘Meridian’ is likely to become one of the best records released through these names. So much for that meridian there then, eh? To downgrade: this is an awesome, cosmically precipitant collection, and certainly one worth spending money on.