a Vinyl & CDs

Review: Created as an accompaniment to a sixteen-minute film about a water park in Edmonton, Canadian drone artist Dirty Beaches has seen fit to issue his ethereal soundtrack on 10" through Anton Newcombe's A Records imprint. Taking the gentler, melodic approach to noise, Alex Zhang Hungtai employs guitar, piano and lots of reverb amongst other synthesized sounds and squashes it all through a crust of analogue degradation for a truly dreamlike end result. There are brief moments of abrasive sound design, as on "Floating Underwater Watching Waves", but any such fiery sonics are bookended by prolonged, meditative excursions into repeated harmonic phrases.