Avifaunal’s music ruffles its colour-dashed wings. It clips the tips of inner hemispheres, set free like an eagle in your mind, before diving into a secret forest concealed by continuous conscious thought, a wooded place entrenched in roots and tangled up in an arching labyrinth of branches. Spirit-like sounds emerge like murmurs, floating over the ground and wrapping the listener up in a cocoon of entrancing strings and lucid states. The opening drone fogs up like cold breath on glass, or a series of loose, misty swirls hanging over the forest at dawn, but it soon evaporates, warming at the arrival of a brighter drone that’s been favoured by the Sun. Its wingspan is impressive – wide enough to bring in a whole new world.
Avifaunal’s drones reflect pale, washed-out colours. Their pearl-like sheen occasionally darkens as something hovers in its light, blotting out the purer rays of the spectrum every now and again. At first, the airy, clear-as-day tones weigh heavier, squinting blearily through May light at seven in the morning. Pausal’s inscriptions are written in fine ink upon their deep, glinting textures, and a gentle, ever-loving source of light flows out from their heaven-sent music.
Warmer trickles of sound run down the sides of the opening, continuous piece, which mixes things up with a slightly foreboding series of bleak shadows and black hollows, but brighter sounds are interspersed here and there, spreading like seeds in the air. On the third part of ‘Murmuration’, everything swells to a point of predestined climax, the gradual unfurling of its pretty wings like a striking image of an earlier premonition, the intricate shapes and hieroglyphics painted upon them a stunning revelation to both eyes and ears. Pausal’s fountain of harmonious music escapes into the world, leaking out from fertile soil.
The remaining three tracks, ‘Spiral’, ‘Scatter’, and ‘Soar’, are chant-filled invocations, lighter than the earlier, cloudier tracks; less muscle coats their bones, but they nevertheless occupy the same range of emotional density. They almost bubble up like pure water from a hot spring, cleansing the earlier fog with a soothing inhalation of steam. Things lighten, and the horizon shifts to become a bisecting line of empty expanse: deep blue skies up above, and a citadel of leaves down below. Freedom lifts it up, and then it slowly fades into the distance. The lighter tones are a gentle encouragement as these young wings begin to take flight.