Memory Waste

This wonderfully spacey new guitar duo is an offshoot of prolific New London, CT psych-rock collective Slyne and The Family Stoned (not to be confused with the UK’s Sly and The Family Drone, of course). Appropriately, that ensemble is centered around pun-loving guitarist Michael Slyne, but Bent Light finds him in a much more ambient/drone mood than usual. Slyne’s co-conspirator in this project is occasional Family Stoned member and pedal steel guitarist Russell Linder, who was amusingly immortalized in the title of The Family Stoned’s Russ Never Sleeps album. Aside from their usual instruments, the two artists employ an array of tape loops, pedals, and shortwave radio transmissions to conjure the sort of twinkling and gently psychotropic reverie that is absolutely begging to be played in a planetarium (though the album description’s helpfully notes that a deserted drive-in movie theater during a snowstorm would be an appropriate setting as well).

The album is divided into two side-long pieces that were apparently recorded in a cold and damp basement last spring during a bout of severe allergy symptoms (“nose dripping, mouth breathing, eyes itching, blurred vision”), which goes to show that sublime beauty can blossom in the most unlikely and unexpected places. In the opening “Gain,” Linder’s languorous and meditative pedal steel casts a spell of dreamlike tropical exotica over a subtly trippy backdrop of warped and murmuring tapes and snatches of distorted voices plucked from radio waves. Slyne’s guitar is similarly understated, as he enhances the “moonlit lagoon” vibe of Linder’s pedal steel with a host of quietly melodic improvisations and echoing scrapes and string noises. While that may not sound like radical new psychedelic territory on paper, the magic lies in the duo’s perfect balance of elements, as the piece has the feel of a floating, sensuous, and undulating sound collage with a wonderfully hallucinatory and unpredictable undercurrent of mysterious submerged voices, tape hiss, and animal-like howls that beautifully fray, smear, and quaver in the piece’s final minutes.

The album’s second half, “Decametric,“ is a similarly mesmerizing bit of twinkling, slow-motion cosmic heaven, but the dog-like howls of its predecessor are swapped out for something that sound like a time-stretched chorus of bullfrogs and the guitars expand into more shimmering and shoegaze-y territory. There are also some new trebly distortions and marimba-like percussive harmonics, but my favorite stretch is either when the gently pulsing ambient chords dissolve into gently lapping waves or when everything falls away at the end to leave behind a haunted coda of ghostly tape loop phantoms. As Ryan Smith insightfully observes in the album’s description, “dissolution is a part of it…edges fray, things fall apart,” which is the trait that most clearly separates Bent Light from illustrious kindred spirits like Flying Saucer Attack and Windy & Carl at their most meditative and instrumental. In short, The Daylight Is Ours is a beautifully dreamlike and sustained glimpse of understated space rock bliss that is rendered even more exquisite by the sense that it could evaporate at any moment, as more enigmatic and haunted sounds are always bleeding in and gnawing at the edges. This is one hell of an impressive debut.

Listen here.