Pete Swanson & Ilyas Ahmed, “Things Left Unseen” (Geographic North, 2026)
This is apparently the first time that these two Pacific Northwest underground luminaries have ever recorded together, but the pair actually have quite a long shared history, as Swanson was literally the first person that Ahmed met when he originally moved to Portland back in 2006. Two decades later, Swanson and Ahmed are now living in the same neighborhood and regularly hanging out once more, which inspired Geographic North to “challenge them” to “finally document their duo work.” The resultant session is a pair of pieces recorded “live to tape in a single room with zero overdubs,” with Ahmed playing “melodic fragments and phrases on guitar” and Swanson looping and collaging Ahmed’s sounds in real time “as a sort of live composer.” As it turns out, that is quite an effective strategy, as Swanson’s blown-out and churning noise undercurrent is the perfect counterbalance for Ahmed’s spidery and elegantly chiming guitar work.
The opening “Room of One” begins as an unexpectedly beautiful ambient piece, as Ahmed’s guitar gently shimmers and undulates in a quiet sea of hissing static and distortion blooms. Gradually, however, the noisier bits fade deeper into the background and a new motif takes shape in which layers of clean, chiming arpeggios languorously and organically intertwine over a backdrop of hissing rain, crackling swells, and distant rumbles. That too proves to be ephemeral, however, as Ahmed soon launches into a sliding and voice-like lead guitar motif while Swanson begins to unleash panning and rhythmic cascades of howling noise. Notably, however, those noise cascades feel less like razor-edged violence than they do unnaturally large crashing waves on an otherwise picturesque and meditative beach scene. That is quite fitting, as all the noisier bits gradually fall away entirely for a tenderly beautiful final act that weaves gently chiming harmonics, murmurs, flickers, and an occasional bent note into an immersive and rippling coda of sublime bliss.
On the closing “After Leaving,” Ahmed kicks things off in more floating and mysterious fashion, as a murmuring web of guitar flickers is gradually enhanced by a backdrop of subtly crackling and smeared distortion and a long, slow scraping texture. Amusingly, I found those scrapes so weirdly mesmerizing that I was later surprised to discover that everything else had sneakily and gradually become a smeary and blown-out grotesquery of its former self with curdled notes dragging bubbling and blackened decay in their wake. From that point onward, the heart of the piece becomes a gently roiling and soft-focus quiet storm of smeared and ruined guitar noise. While Ahmed’s lazily chiming and clean arpeggios never fully dissolve into that steadily intensifying storm. Swanson’s eerily poignant and blown-out maelstrom gradually blossoms into something more otherworldly and beautiful with rhythmic feedback blooms and blackened “negative image” ghosts of Ahmed’s melodies.
While I am not usually a big fan of improvised/live collaborations with no overdubs or re-working, Things Left Unseen is a refreshing exception to the parade of well-meaning yet meandering and half-based misfires that usually results from that scenario. Instead, this tape feels like an unexpectedly wonderful middle ground somewhere between Ahmed’s more melodic solo work and Swanson’s long-running and beloved noise project Yellow Swans. On the one hand, Ahmed’s tender melodies benefit greatly from the added heft and snarl of Swanson’s transformations, but I also enjoyed how Swanson’s contributions felt more like the more noise-damaged end of dreampop or shoegaze than his usual sharp-edged and volcanic Yellow Swans fare. As Ahmed himself observes, “it took 20 years of friendship, with all the shit we’ve been through together—having never artistically collaborated—to get to this point and have it work.” Hopefully Geographic North will manage to coax some more releases out of these two, as Ahmed and Swanson have crafted a very cool shared vision that beautifully reshuffles their usual balance of beauty and ruin into something new. If not, it is at least heartening to know that two neighbors in Portland are regularly convening to make mangled, noise-damaged guitar music together solely because they love doing it.
Listen here.
