Sparrow Juice

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The improvised music on Sparrow Juice, from Ukraine’s Moglass, is exceedingly difficult to categorize, because it’s equally difficult to find points of comparison. Layering synthesizers, guitars, field recordings, and other sound effects, Yuri Kulishenko (a.k.a. Paul Kust) and Oleg Kovalchuk – with a few tracks including Vladimir Bovtenko on sax and Kostya Bovtenko on voice – have found a particular niche that crosses boundaries between jazz and soundtrack, post-rock and noise, even avant-folk and musique concrete. Perhaps the foremost ingredient here is an accomplished approach to drone, seemingly blending guitars and synthesizers with ingredients that have a more organic feel, thanks to conscious use of those field recordings and other treatments.

The Moglass also succeed in balancing a dark mood with textures that give many of the songs a peculiar kind of beauty. Pieces like “Indirect News” and “Revisited with K.” pull the listener into a dreamlike vision, filled with echoey vistas of electronic washes and barely-recognizable sounds of voices and buzzing sax. They’re very pretty works in an abstract, otherworldly way. In fact, when clear bass notes begin midway through “Revisited with K.,” it’s a bit of a shock because they sound out of place amidst the other, drifting, sounds.