En — Already Gone

En are a duo of Maxwell August Croy and James Devane from San Francisco and Already Gone is their second album in three years. Their first, The Absent Coast, was released in 2010 on Root Strata, the label Croy runs with the polymathic Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Although both albums help to establish the pair's proficiency at coaxing drones out of a pool of acoustic instrumentation, Already Gone is a little more eventful and playful than the frozen textures and suspended atmospheres of their debut.

The disk slowly fades into the room with layers of a beautiful simmering koto that slowly cools into lazier tones from what could be a toy piano urged onward by a brief bass figure.  It's followed by the breezy wind chimes of 'The Sea Saw Swell', an ebb and flow of rusty strumming gradually taking a hesitant lead. 'Marble Steppe' then gently teases a feint melody on a shy melodica, sounding bowed like a quelled Dirty Three interlude, while the title track is almost as slow as a sunrise with its serene unfurling of shimmering harmonics.

But, as all these pieces both fade in and out without their apex' lasting more than a few minutes, it is left to the final track's 19 minutes to showcase En's full fragile spectrum. 'Elysia' places its listeners in a hushed outdoors suggested by light rustling movements and the odd bird call as dreamy organ tones cascade downwards. Their steadily repeated trajectory is joined by a rippling koto to form a brook that eventually flows underground. Here they find a gently reverberating chasm in which to spread the remnants of their tones as they float ever upwards, finding ways out to return to a patient sea.

Through affording a greater timeframe, 'Elysia' succeeds in
transporting its audience where the preceding tracks fail. Their all too brief exposures offer a mere glimpse of the organic world En create, whereas 'Elysia' hangs around long enough to provide a more memorable travelogue of their soporific sound world.