Hiss Tracts
Shortwave Nights
(Constellation, 2014)
Growing meets Godspeed You! Black Emperor on this long-planned collaborative LP, a guitar-guided standoff between Kevin Doria and David Bryant that stems from a 2008 performance at the Lausanne Underground Film Festival. The duo’s cinematic roots—reinforced by the presence of Godspeed projectionist/experimental filmmaker Karl Lemieux early on—could have led to cliched riffs on the same peak/valley dynamics that plague many post-rock instrumentalists. Instead, Doria and Bryant spent five years developing a record that does much more than simply drone us to death. It shows its teeth as well, to the point where a track like “Test Recording at Trembling City” reads as both frantic and frightening—background music with a bite.
Hiss Tracts
Shortwave Nights
