The more abstract music gets, the harder it gets to assess its quality in empirical terms. You can’t sing along to a 15 minute ambient track, or hum it, or rock out to it in the car with your friends — so what makes it “good”? For argument’s sake, let’s say it’s a question of physical and emotional response; the best abstract material will take you places, make you feel things, and generally affect your perceptions while you’re at it.Tom Carter, better known as Charalambides, is the biggest name on this globe-spanning ambient split. Teamed with Vanessa Arn (Primordial Undermind), he coughs up a pair of resonant, atmospheric tracks. Opener “Mojave” is endless open space as rendered in musical form — sighing lap-steel notes and generated tones processed into howling winds, heat-haze and eye-bewitching expanses of monochromatic sand. At nearly eleven minutes, it’s quite a sonic hike, but “Atmananda” more than doubles its run time. The detail is more extensive here — a progressive series of bell-like tones, resonant whirring noises and almost-air raid siren howls that drift in and out of focus like objects on a fog-shrouded road. There’s even an addled guitar lurking in the mist somewhere near the six-minute mark; it yields a befuddled, quasi-mystical jangle of notes before disappearing. In short, this is moody, meditative, potentially disquieting stuff — never overtly frightening, but unlikely to inspire pleasant daydreams about flowers and bunnies.
Ukrainian improv trio The Moglass, who can hear stuff like “Atmananda” every night simply by opening a window (or so we’ve all been lead to believe about Eastern Europe), favor a denser sound — which isn’t surprising, as they have more members to keep busy. Their “Untitled (Tawny Owl)”, for example, sounds a bit like a late-night nature hike with members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, during which you have a close encounter with an alien spaceship. Once again, the impetus here isn’t so much musical as mood-defining, and headphones are more or less required to reveal the full extent of the trio’s layered sonic collage — scrapes and clatters, electronic shrieks and effects-treated rattles stirring mysteriously behind an impenetrable mesh of synth drone. “The Map (Webfootprinted)” dangles some more conventional music as a lure — a ghostly trail of violin, a brief burst of marching band — but you’ll quickly be pulled into the ever-changing murk behind them. Almost-recognizable instruments emerge as the piece builds: an effects-treated guitar chatters away like a cartoon duck, and an angry bass guitar emerges from its lair, strings humming and clanging. These questionable companions will dog your steps, sometimes camouflaged and sometimes audible, as the thirteen-minute piece rolls inexorably forward.
Closer “Kakerlakische Kakerlak” begins with laughing, chattering human voices — a timely opportunity to reconnect with your own humanity — but don’t be fooled. Soon enough, we’re once again plowing through sheets of resonant haze, striated notes shimmering and hanging in the air as they seethe and pulse. Fragments of speech are distantly audible as the drone pulses brighter and darker, and eventually there’s a hint of a more conventional melody line looped deep in the mix — nine or ten notes that lurk, semi-audible, beneath the track’s surface, emerging from their feedback cocoon like the most fragile and spindly of butterflies as the piece dwindles to its conclusion.
These descriptions may sound like faint praise, but they’re intended as an endorsement; it’s simply difficult to adequately describe a sensation that’s more visceral and intrasensory than musical. In the right circumstances, any of these five pieces can summon its own measure of spine-tingling, consciousness-trapping reality. The places to which Snake Tongued Swallow-Tailed takes you may not be recognizable physical landscapes — and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be pleasant places to visit — but they’ll seem palpably real while you’re there. Like a particularly vivid nightmare, the quality of the experience ultimately transcends its purpose.
— George Zahora