First I had to find out what kind of outfit had released this CD, and I found it to be something like Swedish label Kning Disk, i.e. a recording company that prints their issues on hardcore vinyl as well as on CDs – and an important aspect is the involvement of visual arts and a sense of the vinyl (not the CD, so much) as an art object in itself. The fine antiquarian bookshop Rönnells in Stockholm has also taken upon them to release their own sound productions of historic textsound works by, say, Åke Hodell, and fresh lingual/electronic experiments like The Wonderful Life of Birds by Joakim Pirinen and Mikael Strömberg. A pure sound poet like French banker Bernard Heidsieck in Paris has released a good number of CDs with books on al dante containing the poems.
The releases in this realm are artistic – sometimes avant-garde or what I’d call laconistic - concepts in addition to being listenable carriers of audio. This is quite nice, indeed. German percussionist and hurdy-gurdy player Matthias Kaul has released a number of fantastic arty concept albums – in fact CDs – in, amongst other places – a Hamburg gallery, for instance with collaborators like Vermont violinist Malcolm Goldstein. Another high-ranking art concept producer of sound is Australian violinist John Rose, whose enormous recordings of eternal Australian fences come with a decimeter of real rusty barbed wire!
So Thorén and Chantler fall nicely into this tradition; one which I appreciate a lot! Come to think of it, the ruling king of arty vinyls must be the withdrawn and awkward and very interesting Norwegian guitarist (and more) Askild Haugland, with his ongoing project Taming Power and his label Early Morning Records.

The London-based marital duo For Barry Ray utilizes organs, piano, guitar, undefined gizmos, electronics and, on three tracks, a clarinet played by Dom Garwood – all this oftentimes in dreamy, lofty drifts of sonorities. When I see a picture of the couple – which I use here – I’m struck by some kind of feeling of surprise at their down home genuine actuality, as if this fairytale music couldn’t have originated in this stark, palpable and curiously self-evident garden reality… hehe!

The music commences (track 1) head-on without any time to brace yourself, a little bit like some of the tunes from Australian collective Music of Transparent Means, and more to the point Alex Carpenter’s DVD Studies in Dynamic Photography.

It’s a soaring, drifting, ever-vanishing and ever-appearing kind of illusion, static and dynamic simultaneously, like a thought looping yet changing color and focus: a multi-breathed drone, Pauline Oliverosish!

Track 2 cuts in like a samurai sword, without mercy, decapitating the moment, throwing you into a maze of rusty hinges and tumbling buckets; a makeshift farmhand nightmare after an evening of too much, too strong fluid. A trembling, vibrating stroke inside the hellhound audio hints at a meditative state inside intoxication, and that is the road to take in all this, magically shifting attention to an inward mantra of invasive audio of great and mystical serenity…

Track 3 hits the rock n’ roll guitar, roaring 1960s Who fuzz-box and all, My Generation… but it stays in the wall of sound enigma, again reminding me of some of the best stuff out of Askild Haugland’s Norse magic, cutting and slicing and splicing time into a matter of dense space; nowhere to hold on, just barely hanging on, and it’s a scary joyride of sorts into shaman mindsets and back, rocking and rolling on the way to enlightenment! Great, ecstatic sound feasts achieved by simple means: great art; soil and rock and clouds of butterflies!

Track 4 lets events drift forwards and backwards, in some kind of tape manipulation; probably digitally achieved, but sounding much like analogue tape in several layers, tweaking back and forth in elf audio, Revolver-like, rays of sound diagonally through coniferous circumstances, hitting a moss-laden rock far out in Silence, everything suddenly focused: a real midst of Life found and treasured.

Track 6 is so short I keep it on repeat for a while, because it’s made up of a number of minuscule ingredients that I truly enjoy; some short, haphazard cut-ups that keep fluttering up like flakes of soot, right in your face, in the tradition of latter-day electronica from, for example, Andreas Bertilsson - the modal and abrasive, lean and scarring, simultaneously pouring incompatibles down your Now. "Love is the last light spoken" (Dylan Thomas)

The last track – 9 – brings on a introverted Morton Feldman piano, laconically, with a Mårten Falk guitar – or in detached concentration; a state of relaxed attention, like that of a three-year old child with a bucket of sand under drifting summer clouds: the intention of the Universe focused in the egolessness of this child in this moment, before the I flows back into it with its curse… yes, so is this meditation that Thorén and Chantler calls Blending Light; a transparent and lucid space, gently measured by the extraneous ticking of an old clock.