Deuce Avenue - Death of Natural Light (2020)

Recent Cleveland transplant Noah Anthony's latest monochrome meditation as Deuce Avenue strips the palette back to barren tones and air vent resonances, pitched to half-speed and filtered through an Arp: Death of Natural Light. Recorded last winter on the heels of his more rhythmic No Rent debut, The Blasting Years, the intention was to create something “very nocturnal and warm.”

This is overtly music of and for the night, slow-motion swaths of hissing steam and cavernous dust, lurking in a shuttered concrete hangar. Layers of subliminal grey haze and emaciated synth emerge and dissipate in slow arcs, like the whispers of long dead machines. The B side piece, “Blood Turns Black,” skews both more erratic and more unsettling: metallic fog, looped footsteps, clattering train tracks. Fleeting audio mirages heard from within a locked trunk.

It's a persuasive return to the blanker, bleaker spectrum of Anthony's work, far from the compact downer synth-pop of recent Profligate recordings. Across its spacious 51 minutes Death radiates a thousand shades of muted menace and shivering negative space, unhurried, unrelenting, and unforgiving.

Tracklist:
1 01. Deuce Avenue - Death of Natural Light, Pt. 1 (12:01)
1 02. Deuce Avenue - Death of Natural Light, Pt. 2 (13:27)
1 03. Deuce Avenue - Blood Turns Black, Pt. 1 (14:26)
1 04. Deuce Avenue - Blood Turns Black, Pt. 2 (11:02)