The modern world is a marvellous place. Not many years ago, the idea of a Chinese band and a US duo collaborating on a record would have been pure fantasy. But over the course of a year and across thousands of miles, they created a gloriously cinematic instrumental post-rock EP.
‘Starlight Pact’ is the first of the two tracks, a slow-burning work rising from shimmering guitars and chiming notes, gradually adding sonic layers, such as skittering percussion and orchestral sweeps, before beats fall into place, anticipation replaces atmosphere and then…boom…dense and delicious walls of metallic shoegaze-ry explode through the listener’s consciousness before the song drifts away on the breeze.
The second, slightly longer of the two pieces, ‘Buried Between’ uses its seven and a half minutes to explore such dynamics even further by starting in an even more minimal, brooding place, musing longer in such spaciousness and, when the tension has done its work, breaking point imminent, exploding in even more heightened crescendos. Between these two extremes, pianos cascade, strings delicately murmur and searing, almost industrial guitars scythe and scald.
These are songs of scale, moving from the fragmented and fragile to the soaring peaks of extreme musicality; there isn’t a sonic range they don’t embrace, and there are few genres they don’t reference, at least rock-adjacent ones.
In turn, the two tracks are delicate and devastating, graceful and grandiose, understated and cinematic. And they speak more eloquently through mood and emotion in their collective, wordless 14 minutes than many bands’ lyrics do in their whole careers.
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