[ambient, electronic] (2025) Immersion & SUSS - Nanocluster Vol. 3 [FLAC] [DarkAngie]

Review:
Propulsion and stillness coincide in the atmospheric “State of Motion,” an early single from this third volume in the Nanocluster series. Vibrations build and surge, their overtones merging in limpid pools of sound. A pedal steel arcs over ambient tones, a drum beat pushes it onward, but mostly this music doesn’t develop so much as it exists. You can float on it, on your back, like a swimmer in salt water, effortlessly taking in the liquid tone and pulse of it. Nanocluster Vol. 3 pairs Wire’s Colin Newman and his creative partner Malka Spigel with cosmic country’s SUSS, two sets of musical talents that Dusted has long admired. We’ve covered works by Spigel and Wire since moving to the Tumblr and Githead in the before times. As for SUSS, of the 2024 Birds and Beasts, we wrote, “SUSS, from New York City, explores many of the same haunted textures as Chuck Johnson and Pan*American, letting sustained notes linger in shimmering layers of slow-moving sound.” The two creative forces meet in a mysterious, edgeless place, which you can imagine as a sort of afterlife, where songs go to hover, float and decay. Previous Nanocluster outings brought the Newman and Spigel into synchrony with Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier, Tarwater, Ulrich Schnauss and Robin Rimbaud of Scanner in volume one, with Thor Harris and Cubzoa in volume two. But SUSS seems like an unusually fertile pairing, bringing in the idealized, crystallized versions of Americana instruments like pedal steel and mandolin. The aptly named “Cross-Pollination” burbles and glows, its tones flowing over the sides like icy water from a spring. Something like a flute blows at bright, well-separated intervals, marking time, while a woozy harmonica carves out melody against bell-tone clear electronics. The country elements are distilled down to pure nature and brought into alignment with a pulsing, driving Kraut-rocking beat. “The Nameless,” coming late in the album, is maybe the most serene and lovely as these cuts, letting the plaintive echo of pedal steel travel across rippling waves of electronic sound. It sounds like a disembodied spirit traversing alien digital space, a blip in the system saying “I was here. I was here.” — dusted



Track List:
01 - Khamsin
02 - In Between Us
03 - Luminous
04 - Cross Pollination
05 - In The Far Away
06 - The Nameless
07 - State Of Motion
08 - Altitude
Media Report:
Genre: ambient, electronic
Origin: New York, New York, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26)
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