Growing ★★★★ Diptych SILVER CURRENT. CD/DL/LP

Master purveyors of heavy ambience discover their spiritual home.

Silver Current, the label run by Ethan Miller of Comets On Fire, Howlin Rain and Heron Oblivion, might not be an immediately obvious home for an ambient record: Miller’s psychedelic aesthetic has always seemed noisier and ‘jammier’ rather than meditative. But Olympia’s Growing are not a typical ambient band, and for the best part of two decades they’ve been attacking new age-adjacent music with a punk energy akin to that of Miller, while avoiding the gothic intimations of doom that can bedevil some other practitioners of heavy drone. Diptych comprises two tracks of gracefully percolating hum and flicker, where sustained tones of guitars and keyboards flow effortlessly into one another, and occasional fizzles of amp-burn punctuate the dream state. Strip off the rock’n’roll trappings of Spiritualized circa Pure Phase, or tune in to Terry Riley at his most horizontal, and you are close to the immersive pleasure here. John Mulvey