One of my ex-boyfriends used to tell me how creepy the music i was falling asleep to was. Of course I was aware that Set Fire to Flames' Sings Reign Rebuilder and Stars of the Lid's The Tired Sounds of... weren't Disney soundtracks, but i hadn't really been paying attention to that aspect of the music. I haven't had a nightmare in a decade. 

I have been listening to this album for the last two hours and i'm not feeling really good. This is a split cd that isn't really a split cd. The 7 first tracks are compositions by Magwheels, that is, a guy named David Sullivan fooling around with microphones, guitars and a laptop, and the two last tracks are not really compositions, and not really remixes either. Stone Glass Steel -aka Philip Easter (when did people stop trying to find cool aliases ?) created two 20 minutes-long pieces of music out of Magwheels' 7 tracks. 

Now that you know that, let's talk about the music. Even if it's not an easy thing to do, this is a record that is worth diving into. It sounds like busier Stars of the Lid. It's often anxiously creepy, sometimes surprisingly relaxing but almost always clever and beautiful, in a more or less worrying way. This is the kind of music that cannot be shared, simply because you need headphones to really listen to it. Complete silence is needed to appreciate drone music. Silence is as much or more important than the sounds coming out of these tracks. These sounds make you appreciate silence. It could be listened to at a high volume in a huge desert field on a summer night or in shady woods under the rain, but you still wouldn't be able to share it. The music concealed in Pane is sometimes bleak, sometimes dreamy. It is so inhumanly massive that the only thing that will make it "good" or "bad" is your own self. 

I enjoy the two last tracks better. It feels good to actually listen to something.

-Barbara H

/feb 1st 2004/