Tiresias — Niton
Knowing nothing about the group, and judging by the suprematist 'beige and green circle' cover art, I was expecting an abstract, work of minimalist drone or austere avant garde. I was startled to hear what seemed to be the sound of a band in the first track "Uploud", easily the loudest and boldest moment on the record, with satisfyingly crunchy stabs of saturated percussive guitar chug.
The energy of this first piece falls away into something closer to the expected ambient sounds in the second, much longer piece, "Neeing", a crossfaded collage of pads, haunting e-bow sustains, emotionally desperate cello solos, and throbbing droplets of muted bass synthesizer. This tracks turns out to be a lot more typical of the album in general, a glimmering, tonality-infused drift of neon squelches and throbbing subterranean bubblings. The guitar is still present, but in an ambient rather than percussive capacity.
The overall tone resolves to that of a bright, colorful and optimistic space rock exploration, a stylistic homage to the inner and outer space journeys of Tangerine Dream's classic records. That classic motorik, grid-locked beat of krautrock functions as our tether yet again in tracks such as "Pato", the rhythm spiraling in a cascading contrail of delays. The sound palette of ambient music's original era is fully recreated here, with a coating of tube amp fuzz over everything, particularly the insistent and simple rhythms, tom-tom-like textures somewhere between the warm tonality of a string bass and the punch of a kick drum.
The album is very long at 76 minutes, and starts to feel lacking in direction after awhile. What set Tangerine Dream's records apart, in the end, was not their production ingenuity, but their unique ability to create a narrative with satisfying emotional resolution. Though sonically pleasing to the ear, Niton's music falls short of such a relatable and poignant momentum.
Oddly enough, the album's most intense moments arrive in its first couple of minutes, after which it seems to dissipate into deeper and deeper stillness, in quite anti-climactic fashion. This actually makes it a good album for drifting off to sleep, as the delirious, luminescent softness of a piece like "Had is the Weakest Point" invariably induces lethargy. There are numerous points at which the music seems to slip deeper and deeper into unthinking blankness, to be revived several minutes later by the first hint of a melodic Moog lead or fragmentary cello phrase.
All in all, "Tiresias" is a pleasant, if often unengaging and meandering album. Niton possesses a real ability to summon dazzingly rich textures from their instruments, and blend them beautifully with one another, but could perhaps tighten their improvisations into something more concise, directed and intentional. As a whole, this record feels rather bloated, and awkwardly indecisive as to energy level, bursting into distorted fury just when it seems to have finally settled down for good, and petering out just as real vigor and vitality has at last begun to emerge. I am left feeling like this kind of music has been executed with greater charisma.