Red Needled Sea, Time.Recall.Now (CDR Sqrt Label)

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Judging by the titles to the five tracks on this third release by Red Needled Sea, Panos Alexiades is in some distress.

Reading like SOS messages, they progress from desperate to resigned: "Not Dead", "Just Breathing", "Something Like I´m Alive", "To My Home" and finally, "I Say Goodbye". The music offered under these rubrics is a variant of drone whose relatively uninterrupted calm is itself an unsettling foundation.

"Just Breathing" might just be the most mesmerizing track, a big, cathedral-like drone that lulls you before occasionally snapping your brain to attention with cheap sound effects, though the next track, "Something Like I´m Alive", features interesting investigations into and sonic annoyance of the acoustic piano. And a full half the album is comprised of the closing track, elegiac in nature, grand, noble, sometimes delicate, majestic, sweeping, utterly final.

Just like the very DIY cover in which Sqrt has released this CDR, Time.Recall.Now seems very homemade, on inexpensive instruments of low quality. But the results are anything but. It is straightforward with a bit too much happening to be relegated to the background as background music. The listener often finds him or herself cast back and forth between high, agitating pitches and low, reassuring rumbles.

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