Morning Stalker / The Ghost Of 29 Megacycles
Silhouettes 2

Forget the somewhat sinister name – Morning Stalker doesn’t just doesn’t do menacing. Eerie? Yes. Haunting? Sure. But what darkness there is on 'Bromden' is the hazy kind you find in the gloaming, not the impenetrable black of midnight. The first third of ‘Bromden’ sees Morgan McKellar (one-sixth of Underlapper) weaving a subtle, oscillating drone from his heavily-processed vocals and looped guitar, before a the arrival of an echo-laden guitar line pulls the track somewhere near Seaworthy territory. All fuzzy edges and warm, inviting tones, 'Bromden’ is precisely the kind of track you want to curl up with on a brisk autumn afternoon.

Track two on this split release, ‘The Eye’ – Jasmine Loop Control member Greg Taw’s debut recording under the name The Ghost Of 29 Megacycles – is a good match for 'Bromden'. Making excellent use of a Line 6 pedal, Taw deals in the kind of looped ambience that is the bread and butter of labels like Touch and 12k, all floating, disembodied single notes and shimmering sustain. If ‘The Eye’ seems a bit samey at first, it’s because its surface-level simplicity masks a wide, virtually three-dimensional stereo field only accessible through close listening (preferably with the aid of headphones). What once seemed like formless drift is actually a dense collage of tiny, colliding sounds, all there to be picked apart (slowly, cautiously) with repeated listens.

by Adam D Mills