Written by: Dave Cantrell

There are moments in this (admittedly obsessive) music-listening life when transcendance comes upon you as if brought in by a quiet tide. It is, in such cases, as immutable as it is inevitable, a hum of revelation of sorts, some murmur of wisdom carried in by an otherwise unfelt wind very much as intuition is. And whereas one may think it would thereby be less accessible due its subtler immediacy, the fact is it tends to arrive with an impact like some clap of understated thunder.  As may well be guessed, such a happenstance is damnably rare – here at SEM we can pretty much count on one hand any previous instances that rival today’s example (John Howard’s Across the Door Sill comes to mind and precious few others) – but even those rather pale when held up against the startling, damn near dramatic nuance at hand. Thing is? When it’s the duo at the center of this project, which isn’t even to mention the further mesmerizing factor of the source material, well, speaking personally, it’s no surprise your correspondent is so moved by this release given his memories of London 1979, listening to Peel in a tiny bedsit, going to whatever shows he could given his relative penury etc, but we can assure you that whatever your relationship to music, whatever the many tendrils of its history, the track we’re highlighting here, from Sonic Youth founder Thurston Moore and Bonner Kramer’s upcoming collaborative full-length They Came From Swallows – Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza, due May 1st on Silver Current Records, will without any doubt have a similarly moving effect on you as well.

While, as would be expected by anyone with any sense, the pair’s treatment here leans – ever so gently, mind – toward the more experimental end of the spectrum, it’s nonetheless the case that in its full emotional thrum, in its timeless, shiver-inducing gist, it becomes robustly clear that both artists are honoring the timeless original through their own now-joined filters of respectful awe. The result, to our ears here, amounts to nothing less than a kind of rebirth and much of that, we feel, is due the sense one gets that, as artists, Moore and Kramer read each other rather immersively, which in turn makes it a bit of a mystery why the pairing of these two never occurred to us but boy are we happy it occurred to them.

Now, whereas it’s that point in a preview like this that we say “As harbingers go, they don’t come much more promising than this,” the fact is that, having heard the album entire, any one of the seven tracks therein could have, with a grace that runs the spectrum from stinging to startling to invincibly moving, been as intriguing an introduction as “Insight” proves to be. Which is to say, in however obvious a way, stay tuned.