The Shining Path

Dimmer

Melon Expander/Gench/LAFMS
2007
CD

PLAY TRACK

TRACKS

Contrail
Refraction
CO2
Aerosol
SO2
1C

REVIEWS

“...music heavy with a sense of foreboding, but alive with slow motion detail...”— The Wire

The Wire

The Thomas Dimuzio's work has tended towards density recently, and in the company of tape loop manipulator Joseph Hammer (a veteran of various LAFMS affiliated groups), the drones are predictably weighty and forbidding. Dimuzio samples and processes both his partner's contributions and his own synthesizer and shortwave, with the results in turn feeding back into Hammer's tapework. What emerges is a music heavy with a sense of foreboding, but alive with slow motion detail, steering clear of Dark Ambient melodrama in the sub-Lustmord vein. It's only on "1 degree C" that things turn really ugly, with the emergence of machine noise and bursts of synth distortion disrupting the blackest of drone backdrops. For the most part, The Shining Path manages to maintain a sense of detached mystery, allowing the listener to experience it as purely abstract music rather than a Gothic soundtrack to doomladen states of consciousness. —Keith Moline