The Sight Below – Glider/No Place For Us EP

This year marked the reissue of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS albums in a box set called Nah Und Fern. It included GAS, Zauberberg, Konigsforst, and Pop which were all previously out-of-print. Voigt’s output is significant because nearly ten years later we’re still seeing aftershocks of his brilliance in the work of younger artists. He successfully blended pop melody into an amorphous body of minimal techno, albeit stretched to the point of near translucence. This is significant in relation to The Sight Below’s Glider album and No Place For Us EP because whoever is behind the name is making the same kind of music without falling into redundancy and cliche, in effect picking up where Voigt left off and continuing with outstanding results.

While last year’s From Here We Go Sublime album by The Field surely took cues from Voigt’s work (it was released on Kompakt, a label run by Voigt himself), it was missing something vital: patience. By speeding up the tempo of the beats underneath his ambient compositions, The Field’s Axel Willner made music that was a little too dancefloor ready to really have the same effect that Voigt did on his masterworks. Seattle artist The Sight Below hits it spot on while coming at the sound from a slightly different direction – the beats are weighted against the music in a manner that feels like everything is drowning. Instead of using orchestral strings like Voigt, The Sight Below uses guitar textures that evoke shoegazers Slowdive. The overall effect is hypnotic. Both the No Place For Us EP (which can be downloaded for free at http://ghostly.com/releases/no-place-for-us) and Glider album contain plenty of reasons to be calling The Sight Below the rightful heir to Voigt’s throne.

If there’s any real difference between the EP and the full-length it’s nominal. No Place For Us has three tracks that have fairly distinct identities. I don’t mean that to be critical of Glider though. It sounds carefully designed to be listened to from start to finish with no breaks. The tracks themselves don’t seem to have been placed arbitrarily but some of the melodic undercurrents present in earlier pieces find ways of deftly weaving themselves back into the fabric of later ones. The slow clicking beats underneath the guitar keep the pace utterly glacial. By the time of finale “Nowhere,” the rhythm has disappeared into a wormhole and what’s left is a gently wafting smokescreen of melody. With winter looming on the horizon, The Sight Below has crafted a magnificent album and EP to help weather the darker nights and snowy days.