In the last couple of decades there’s been a parallel movement to harsh noise that is just as edgy and artful, but that directs its violence and focus inwards, like a meditation. The body is not attacked from outside, torn, and bound by industrial mechanization; rather, it is infiltrated by the mind and dissolved from within by its own processes.  Subjected to this environment and enthralled by the logic of explanation, reason marches into itself alongside its technological apparatuses and blows up by contradiction, by denying the body in which it resides. The result of this apparent assassination (the most terrible of crimes) is perhaps a superior state of consciousness - illumination, an ominous Sunshine Noir.

Like Axolotl’s Telesma, this album wields electronics in all their possible iterations: as noise, as drone, as walls-of-sound, as experiments as much as melodic companions. There’s four tools used by Wyndel Hunt to generate these sounds.  While there’s a guitar in the mix, it matters little, because the sounds are all fully integrated into the artist’s persona, inseparable and organically fitted into a meaning-producing machine that works its way into the final performance of the aforementioned crime. What does matter is the way in which this machine operates, taking clear cues from Tim Hecker’s An Imaginary Country as much as from any of Xela’s work, driving all those electronics through a filter of ambient to form a product that is expansive, hypnotizing, passively intense, and powerful. Thankfully, one of the pieces of evidence in the crime scene is a subtle trace of humor, a playful sensibility that gets to make fun of everything that is serious in this production.  A “Plot Device,” nearing the end of the album, advances the non-narrative somewhere via small, happy-sounding bits of melody that reminds this listener of something almost New Age sounding. And where could we locate all this ‘meditation’ and ‘inward’ thing if not directly related to both genuine and money-grabbing New Age?

The fun, of course, does not end there, and we are immediately treated with a blast of drone in the form of “Sunshine Noir” itself, an electronically generated chant that seems perpetual and immanent as much as it feels transient when it starts to fade out, or when our attentions start to center on the little, almost inaudible bits of noisy intervention scattered all along the drone. By the ending’s silence, the murder has been effected. With no logic and reason remaining to organize and classify reality in order to solve it, we’re thrown into the final track. “Free Dissociation” walks us right into nowhere, into imaginary countries and fantastic, never-before-felt sentiments and experiences.

While this is surely the most enjoyable time I’ve had in the electronic music since Tim Hecker’s or Axolotl’s work, Sunshine Noir is not as well-structured as theirs and can be found either faltering or actually better (depending on one's judgment), just because the narrative it mocks is very present and yet seems too disperse in the beginning. One could think that I’m just falling into the trap of reason, and while maybe I am, it still feels as if the album is truly unfocused at times. In any case, fans of any of the artists mentioned need apply, as well as anyone who is looking for a solid, interesting entrance into the world of electronic music experimentalism.

-David Murrieta