Limited to 50 copies!
Artwork by Katie Griesar
The Lonely Bell’s brilliant new release “The Absent Years” is both palpable and ethereal, as landscape and dreamscape at once, an encounter with an immensity so elegiac and enveloping that it comforts. I’m not sure how to say this, but it feels as if the music itself doesn’t realize how powerful it is, the way it shivers and trembles and pulses and aches its way through lost corridors, unfolding its treasures into gorgeous, expansive mystery.
Initially the terrain is almost glacial, but soon enough, there is evidence of signal fires. Fragments emerge as if by sinking so deeply into the chasm one could feel the warm glow of its loneliness, held by its hollow. Nested within, plaintive guitar, distant piano that reminds of some long lost Satie, looping waves, warbled melodies, symphonic articulations, and phantom frequencies that seem to call through the static. Even in the cavernous spaces, the dust shimmers.
- Katie Griesar, Feb 2024
