I have been listening to Ephemera pretty much straight since it arrived in the mail, and, like a little present from on high, delivered by a heavenly postman in gleaming white shortpants and knee socks, it has provided me with much needed relief and solace. Not that this is of any interest to you, nor does it necessarily bear on any objective analysis of Tarentel's music, but I have been immersed in a period of great personal stress. The music contained on Ephemera has provided for me an aural oasis where I might lose myself in its warm pools.
The opening track, "The Waltz," is particularly adept at providing much needed escape. It's a nice and long piece (about 15 minutes... most of the tracks are quite long), that, appropriately enough, waltzes along a gentle tempo, beginning with clean guitar arpeggios, gradually adding drones, which, eventually envelop the melody. The drones pulse and build into a burst of bright sound, that subsides back into the original melody again, this time emboldened with resolute drums.
Unlike many other groups that work the slow burn, Tarentel manages to avoid the seemingly ubiquitous violent cacophony (a la Godspeed, You Black Emperor!) in favor of a more profound progression. Rather than push towards an inevitable breaking point, the song creates an experience more akin to achieving awareness.
The sequencing of the album is also particularly effective. The early tracks, "The Waltz" and "Looking for Things," utilize deceptively simple melodies and moderate rhythms and tempos to create hypnotic states and propel the listener toward the crescendo. "Two
Sides of Myself, Part One" breaks the formula down into a less structured form, creating a bridge to the final two tracks "Two Sides of Myself, Part Two" and "Searching for Things," which are more heavily centered around thick warm drones. Of these "Searching for Things" is the more astonishing of the two—a 25-minute behemoth built out of languid drums, lyric hums, buzzing drones, and other spectral noises periodically beamed in from outer-space. It slowly flows, and the listener drifts along, lost in its murk, then fades to near nothingness, leaving you afloat in a vacuum, like an aural narcotic.
Whether or not you are particularly in need of this kind of fix, the songs collected on Ephemera are a remarkable achievements in terms of utilizing the simplicity of pure tones and expertly mining dynamic shifts. Like Low and Stars of the Lid, Tarentel are able to exercise remarkable patience and restraint to create unique sonic spaces for the listener to inhabit.
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