Twalif X

Around 12 minutes into Twalif X there is a cymbal crash that one pleads will signify a shift in the sound towards something more interesting. It doesn’t. Field recordings are rarely that musical. Instead they often attempt to conjure a space in the listener’s mind. With this in mind, Twalif X is an unbelievably weak collage of field recording babble. The rustle of leaves and dissonant gongs that make up the majority of the sound certainly doesn’t have any transformative quality. An attempt to bring closure to the nauseating 50 minutes, when some aimless arpeggios are plucked on an acoustic guitar, is likewise pointless. The vision of the project is described by the record label A Year in the Country as “an audio-logical journey through one night”. It’s a baffling claim given how amateurish the sound of Twalif X is.

As far as the visual aspect of this release goes, the packaging is similarly thin on the ground - black and white, low definition pictures of some birds flying. As with the audio of this project, the listener is left having to invent the substantial ground omitted between the actual project and that grand audio-logical journey A Year in the Country promises. Field recordings are an acquired taste at the best of times, but there’s niche and there’s lazy. When a product claims to do so much and is executed as poorly as this, it is hard not to define Twalif X as some of the most meaningless dross imaginable.