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No Signal

Spartak
No Signal

4 Track, EP (2009, hellosQuare Recordings)
Related: Spartak.


A few months back, Canberra duo Spartak headed down to the south coast of New South Wales, where they spent two days improvising new music in a house by the sea. The result of this sojourn is the pair’s sophomore album Verona, which is due later this year on hellosQuare. In the meantime, Shoeb Ahmad and Evan Dorrian have graced us with No Signal, which combines three tracks culled from the Verona sessions and a reworked live recording from their 2007 tour of Southeast Asia.

Opening track ‘In A Field of Light’ encapsulates the rapid development of Spartak in the relatively short period since the release of their debut album Tales from the Colony Room. With none of the microscopic post-processing that, for a time, seemed almost synonymous with Spartak, ‘In A Field of Light’ sees Ahmad put down his instruments and join Dorrian in laying down noisy beds of metallic junkshop percussion. Its natural resonance becomes an ever-present drone that gives form to the track’s otherwise abstract soundscapes. At the disc’s other end, the aptly titled ‘Closure’, Dorrian steps out from behind the drum kit to provide wheezy organ notes that Ahmad mulches through his four-track.

No Signal’s highlight, however, is the twelve-minute ‘Sleet/Skid’. As the track warms up, Ahmad’s oscillating guitar collides with Dorrian’s cymbal washes, the tension eventually breaks out midway through with bristling chords and Ahmad’s half-shouted, half-spoken vocals. More visceral than anything they’ve done to date, it bodes very well for Verona indeed.

by Adam D Mills

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Tracklisting
  • 1.   In A Field of Light
  • 2.   Sleet/Skid
  • 3.   The Distance from Here to Time
  • 4.   Closure
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