The Mighty Cloud

Conjure in your mind’s ear a conference room with a reverberation time of 0.6 seconds. Now forget all that because The Mighty Cloud creates an entirely alien sense of time, both collapsing and expanding acoustic behavior until your conference room is a parking structure, your childhood bathroom, the Voynich Manuscript, a field. A remarkably poetic debut of subtlety and finesse, the sound-worlds meticulously fabricated by Portland’s Dave Quam (FKA Massacooramaan, Modern Melodies) and Seoul’s Joe Foster (English, Don Brown and Dan Reynolds) on Especially Songs chart a course through meaning that lures the traveler into not one but many places, lives, beings, composers, movies, rabbit holes of both rodent and Youtube, and then feed the resulting itinerary into a Boltzmann machine, emerging from the process with something akin to divinity: a rest-stop strange loop where nothing is where you expect to find it but everything is in its proper (poetic) place.

Exquisite, if inscrutable, extensions of the electro-acoustic canon, the four pieces constituting Especially Songs leave this writer feeling he can’t get enough. I mean, gimme more painstakingly sculpted scavenged and generic sounds! Gimme life!