LARAAJI, MERZ, SHAHZAD ISMAILY

Three-way collaborative effort manufactures calm from chaos.

Songwriter and sound artist Merz had a vision of creating a new genre of ‘industrial-devotional’ music, and that’s a pretty good description of this album, ambience in chaos. An assemblage of a live collaboration with New Age pioneer Laraaji, songs produced with multi-instrumentalist Ismaily, and solo guitar pieces from

Merz, there’s nevertheless a unifying sonic theme: life trying to drag itself free of the universe’s background noise. It’s dominated by various plucked strings, including harps, zithers, the Chinese guzheng and the Persian santoor, and it often feels like being caught in a celestial

hailstorm, notes raining down or swirling in the air. That’s Your Blue Home starts peacefully enough, chiming guitar against the humming blackness of a bass synth, before a flurry of cosmic strings bursts out of the temple like Alice Coltrane. On Broken Shield, Merz rapidly cycles through his effects board, bringing his guitar to strange, multifaceted life, and on Cima Dome the different elements sound like a momentous battle between legions of heavily armoured insects. The album ends with the ghostly cries of Invisible Now, spirits drifting in an endless, Blade Runner-esque cityscape.