Blank Realm first made an impression on the fringes of rock’s crumbling domain with their 2007 CD-R Free Time. Released on the now defunct Music Your Mind Will Love You label, it presented a band with mixed inclinations. Here was a group with one foot in the rustic free improvisation mindset that Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood inhabited, and the other in a more ethereal, drugged space that brought to mind contemporaries like Castings. After an armload of CD-Rs and cassettes that documented their steady evolution, Heatless Ark is their first vinyl missive. In a cottage industry that favours vinyl as the ultimate desirable, this record brings with it the whiff of ground zero, as if this is the major entry point: the end-of-season wrap up.

The aforementioned reference points aren’t really applicable anymore. Since the release of their 2008 cassette The Returner, Blank Realm have become a more elastic, synaesthetic and approachable affair: extended trance-inducing rock explorations kitted out with synthesizer and drowned wails; indecipherable lyricism that sounds in throe to some supernatural force. It’s a whole lot weirder, basically, imbued as it is with a hazy spaciousness that draws from all the colours of a test signal. They’re a rock band for sure, but the way they wield their tools is refreshing. The riff is never the main concern because Blank Realm prefer to drown theirs in the rapturous indulgence of sound for its own sake. Rhythm is used as a salient back-up in case the swirling colours prove too much to bear.

That’d be very unlikely though, due in no small part to the sedative qualities of Heatless Ark, which proceeds with the lapsing lucidity of a fondly remembered dream just before breakfast. Like all good psychedelic bands, Blank Realm don’t sound anything like where they’re from or where they’re going, but rather like some whim-driven netherworld full of oddities taken for granted. They sit neatly alongside their Not Not Fun stable mates Pocahaunted and Peaking Lights, with their ability to provoke the uncanny half-thoughts submerged within the psyche – like misheard songs broadcast in the dead of night, soundtracking your dreams. More than anything here, ‘Agnes Snow Brain’ sounds like an infectious pop song stretched and contorted through misremembering: as discordant and blissful as a stoned personal rendition. Sarah Spencer’s vocals don’t sound like she knows the words but she knows how they made her feel and she delivers accordingly. All the clues are swept into an all-engulfing storm of hair-raising ambience.

‘Till I Clear My Name’ is another highlight, a song perfectly exemplary of Blank Realm’s greatest asset: their shirking of rock music’s masculinity in favour of a womb-like embrace from a moody and potentially malignant benefactor. Here, Mother Nature is carer and conqueror. And if these are mere tropes they’re marginalised and forgotten ones, lost between the frayed cushions of a pleasure-seeking household, polished and exchanged for a minor epiphany rather than just another beer. Blank Realm sound like they’re searching for some long fabled parallel world and in doing so, they’ve created one.

by Shaun Prescott