- When techno and the US noise underground collided a few years back, _moonraker were one of the resultant chunks of debris. The Philadelphia duo's scuzzed rhythm experiments landed them an EP on The Trilogy Tapes in 2013. (Their other project, Metasplice, shacked up with Rabih Beaini's Morphine.) They've since spun off on their own course. Unvarete II finds them deep in unknown space, where regular rhythms are a distant memory, replaced by sparse nebulae of loops and dissonant melody.
The EP does, at least, offer a few more smudges of light than the forbidding Unvarete I, with which it makes up a two-part LP. It sometimes resembles Luke Abbott's Wysing Forest, if that album's coldness and grandiose melody were teleported into space. The similarity is strong in the final minutes of "Ctalaccein," where a sorrowful melody snakes out of a cloud of hisses and clicks, and in the chords which float grandly over "Ourbrc"'s ice-sculpture soundscape. These elements offer handholds on an otherwise eerily smooth, ungraspable surface. The most forbidding of all is the closer, "Iunoniuc," which is 12 minutes of insectoid creak and clatter through which sour chords float like luminous space gas.
TracklistA1 Ctalaccein
A2 Ourbrc
B1 Iunoniuc