Most popular music is dominated by space and time. Drums and machines loudly tell the audience when to clap their hands and wiggle their legs while aural detritus divebombs at the listeners ears and nervous system for 3 to 5 minutes at a time. If you are lucky there might even be a pretty face or image to manipulate your eyes and create an absolute sensual distraction. The most progressive of minds might stand back analytically and start to question this type of accepted militarism. For example, what if we threw away the linear metronome and concentrate on the space BETWEEN and underneath the sounds? What if we create music that emphasizes power and tone over melodic content and tempo? The essence of the Drone/Ambient ilk is to not only ask these questions but wholly exemplify the answers. Nonetheless, Growing separate themselves from the rest of this seemingly monochrome pack by including rich emotional content and a harmonic accessibility, for lack of a better term. While the music of Sunn is like a colossal black hammer pulverizing your senses into submission, and Earth’s can sound akin to a slow roiling cauldron of anxiety, Growing is more like a glacier in not only pace and spirit but in the fact that you can see through its music and light can thrive within it’s corners and angles. There are also complex emotional explorations here, like the sounds of pensiveness, pleasant ambivalence, and even quiet malaise, feelings that are rarely attained within a pop or even a drone hemisphere. There is a long legacy of music of this style in a recorded context dating back to Charles Ives and up through Dylan Carlson and beyond, but I wasnt really paying much attention to it until I started seeing and understanding their performances, which by the end of their residency in my town were total revelations. Any knowledge of, or passion for, dark cerebral vibrations starts with those dusty basement shows.
recordlections 