Distance generates yearning. and have been making music together for years, split between Philadelphia and Berlin, like two moons orbiting the same sonic planet. finally brings the duo into the same room together, letting them luxuriate in mutual presence and exploration over two discs.
It’s unhurried and effortless. While this is technically their third full-length together, it is the first they have made in complete spectral congruence. Records like and felt like extensions of the communities in which they were surrounded—West Mineral Ltd.
and its mastermind , the Berlin-based ambient-by-way-of-splatter-painting label , and, of course, each other. The oceanic gap between them was shrunk to the size of Perila’s bedroom, recorded in person and, Perila , “in one breath.” Both artists, together and apart, are obsessed with space.
United at last, they abandon blissful beauty for strange pockets of noise and harmony, overlaid in fascinatingly peculiar fashion. sounds nothing like anything they’ve made before, even recently. It synthesizes the lo-fi solo guitar proclivities of Perila’s into the Red Room-esque blues dirge of “cheese homework;” the glitchy hymns of , Ulla’s record with Ultrafog, shapeshift into crackling, membranous jazz on “a josh outside the window.
” Clarinet, cooing vocals, plaintive chords, and the sounds of logs and leaves swirl together as though independent of their creators. “glass containers,” the album’s longest track, is the .