Bellows - Sander (2017)

Sublime electro-acoustic enigmas from Giuseppe Ielasi and Nicola Ratti’s Bellows, recombining their subtle sensitivities a few years on from the Rustl charm for our Boomkat Editions and a handful of acclaimed, respective solo excursions during the interim. Like Latency’s incredible recent dispatch from Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, the unmissable Kulthan, wager that this one will be on our spindle for some time to come.

Recorded by the duo over the course of days in Milan during February, 2016, the five tracks capture Ielasi and Ratti in their element, improvising with an expanded palette of hardware to coax their wonderfully nuanced small sounds into diaphanous but densely layered sonic ecologies of humus-like subbass-shifts, dancing dust particles and alternating atmospheric humidity.

There’s a more refined sense of poise and composure to Sander than the rugged, grubbing oddities of Rustl back in 2015, still maintaining the sense of daydreamy abstraction but, with totally compelling melodic developments in the opening part’s airborne strings and rising subbass percolations, whilst the 2nd part teeters Gas-like cloud structures and whiffs of wistful melodica on a plunging, plangent and steady dub bass that’s former, more pronounced that we’ve previously heard from them.

B-side, they again establish unique dimensions with starkly hollowed drone and slow staggering, reverberant dub pulses leading into the arid and quietly breathtaking waves of chords radiating into distant ether, before closing with what sounds like a melting digital clock in the final strokes.

A must for fans of the quiet things in life…