A collaboration between UK underground music veterans David Knight (Shock Headed Peters, Lydia Lunch) and Stephen Thrower (Cyclobe, Coil) – both of the improvising avant-rock outfit Amal Gamal Ensemble – Temporal Bends transports the listener into the depths though, as its title hints, you’re never quite sure whether you’re drowning or dreaming, stretched or squeezed, coming down or going up. Vintage synthesisers, guitars, sax and clarinet drift, shimmer and swarm, bubbles and blinking lights luring you ever further, ever deeper…
Knight and Thrower bring a deep intuition to the performances, allowing treated guitar, saxophone and clarinet to blend with analogue synthesizers, mellotron and organ… Only occasionally does a locked snippet of sound repeat itself enough to suggest anything like an insistent beat: otherwise the tempo is kept low and slow.
Ken Hollings, The Wire
exactly the sort of music that I would expect to hear if I was rapidly losing consciousness in a pool of my own blood aboard a haunted submarine… This is an impressively ambitious, harrowing, and complex album.
Anthony D’Amico, Brainwashed.
