Thuja - Pine Cone Temples

Genre experimental Publisher Strange Attractors External Links Strange Attractors

Witness here, in Pine Cone Temples, the very edge of creation: blurred, brushed, imprecise, unnamed, barely formed. Thuja's two-disc study in incomplete coagulation - packaged ironically in a white sleeve decorated with Bryan De Roo's painstakingly rendered, watercolor geometric designs - resolutely resists clarity and, when it does happen to embrace the concept of melody, does so grudgingly and uncertainly, as though the band just awoke from a punishing evening of bar-hopping and is struggling to warm up, and to unite its four disparate forces. Eight untitled canvases are presented for the listener's consideration, all violin scrape-drags, drowsy piano plaints, found-sound bird calls imported in at one juncture, poinks and plinks and shuffles and creaks and clanks and clacks and suspicious rustles and hisses, as just-above-perceptible guitar throbs and drones emanate from amps, blearily underlying the rest, sometimes. What emerges is the sense of sitting in on a lengthy rehearsal where nothing happens, on purpose, where the sounds eeked out evoke not so much music per se as a pleasant negation of silence.

More than anything else, Pine Cone Temples inspires curiosity about the circumstances of its creation. These recordings, the inner sleeve informs us, were made between 1999 and 2004; so one is led to try to imagine not only the delicate "sessions" but the process of weeding through years of tape to figure out what would make the final cut. What were the criteria for inclusion? Did anyone fall asleep while performing? Why go to two discs when one would have had the ironic effect of to some extent concentrating this willful, gentle abstraction? And has anyone ever made a hip-hop record like this, you know, with blinged-out rappers practicing accents and playing with lyrics before entering the booth and high-profile producers toying with and ironing out beats? Because someone should, post-haste - it'd likely be as wildly underground - popular with hipsters as Thuja's take on the concept has been this year.