High Aura'D / Josh Mason - Lower Yr. Voice (Gray Vinyl)

This collaborative work by Ohio-based High aura'd and Florida-bound Josh Mason is a tribute to youthful obsessions and glorious decay. ""Lower Yr Voice"" captures all of the static electricity and gorgeous distortion ping-ponging between solid state amps and busted eardrums that filled sweaty basements and VFW halls in the split-seconds between songs performed by bands like Portraits of Past and Clikatat Ikatowi. This record, by two artists with their feet planted in the firma of eliding ambient/drone music, finds the two interpolating the unintended sweetness and experimentation in those between-song pregnant pauses of bands flying the banner of Ebullition and Gravity Records. In doing so, this album is much an homage to a short-lived scene as it is an uncovering of hidden beauty in the youthful overabundance of energy, anxiety, wonder and pain. The slow decay comes sooner than we think, but there is beauty, even in that.