Mamiffer / House of Low Culture — Uncrossing / Ice Mole

As a split release, this offering on Utech Records is more a trailer to the musical union confirmed by the latest full album (Mare Decendril) by the Seattle-based Mamiffer, which sees Aaron Turner (ex-Isis guitarist and head of Hydra Head records) firmly inducted into his wife, Faith Coloccia’s project based around her piano compositions. Reflecting the conjugality, Faith features in Aaron’s contribution to this split as House of Low Culture, presented here as a three piece completed by a surprising guest appearance from the legendary percussionist Z’ev. Both tracks feel like they belong together as they experiment with a ritualistic morbidity that invokes the ghosts of extended prog rock interludes much more than the dynamic contrasts of post-metal.

Up first, Mamiffer’s ‘Uncrossing’ gently unravels Faith’s pastoral, melancholic piano over a low, hovering drone made of humming synth and the shifting grain of a Hammond-like organ chord. As the passage builds with anthemic hope, a strong, full-bodied kick marks the beginning of each slow bar, like an imposing ôdaiko struck with mantric intent it persists right to the end of the piece. The resilient, reverb-rich intonations carry the listener solemnly and stubbornly through the piece as it continues its quest to barren lands, leaving behind the piano as it swells almost into pomposity before disappearing entirely. Beyond this, the latter two thirds of this 12 minute track describe wider, bleaker territories bereft of sad melodies but brimming with elemental forces. Field recordings of a shoreline add rushes of sea air lit by the organ’s wavering irridescence until a crescendo of sorts is reached gradually with grinding electronic tones emerging before the storm passes, leaving the totemic beat in its wake bearing the resilience of a monolith.

‘Ice Mole’ by House of Low Culture takes a similarly stark, ceremonial stance performing an exercise in restraint as its brooding atmosphere builds and transforms steadily and stealthily over twenty minutes. Long periods of hushed atmospherics and shuffling prescences are followed by vocals chanting raga-like on a wind moving with cave-like reverberrations. Drones from guitars pulse and buzz suggesting flies observing the ritual while Z’ev’s sheet metal percussion enters the space with a magisterial force fighting a cauldron of electronics at its centre. All is reduced while single piano chords are sternly unfurled across murmurs of bad wiring until a guitar begins a light interplay slowly forming a prog ambience of Pink Floydian proportions, albeit stripped to bare essentials, before building into a dramatic, dark cloud of distorted power chords and scraping metal.

The release certainly whets the appetite for longer spells in Turner and Coloccia’s now formally bound company. Their patient, spaceous sonics, though stern and disciplined, afford their limited sound pools the room to stir and naturally evolve their own forms that swim with a rapt agility without losing entirely a patina of progressive rock’s stoic pretensions.