Monoliths & Dimensions

The album was created and recorded over a period of two years. The composer Eyvind Kang, the Australian guitarist Oren Ambarchi, the Hungarian singer Attila Csihar, Dylan Carlson of the drone band Earth and the trombonists Julian Priester and Stuart Dempster all took part. There is also an upright bass trio, French and English horns, a harp and flute duo, piano, brass, reed and string ensembles, and a Viennese women's choir led by the composer and singer Jessika Kenney. The band were careful about what that means: "The album is not Sunn O))) with strings or metal-meets-orchestra material." Their approach concentrated on alluding to the timbre of feedback and of the instruments involved, so the piece is illusory, beautiful and not entirely linear. "The end product is the most musical piece we've done, and also the heaviest, most powerful, and most abstract set of chords we've laid to tape." At the launch Stephen O'Malley told Alex Templeton-Ward that the album was "like a prism... our music is the white light going in, a lot of the colour comes out the other side through the amazing arrangements and personalities of the guest performers and core collaborators. I think the main topic of this album is elaboration, expansion and prismatic detail." The closing "Alice" is dedicated to the jazz harpist Alice Coltrane, who died in 2007. It scored 88 on Metacritic across sixteen reviews. The running order here is the original's as printed.