Maths Balance Volumes – Cycles of Tonight LP

Maths Balance Volumes follow up their acclaimed 2020 release A Year Closer with a further and sturdier bucket of songs scraped from the dust of being. Haunted, fragile and beautiful, this is music that explores the ghostly zones of its own creation. The loneliness and vulnerability that unfolds with the opening cut Stay lays the way for exploration of sound and song as simple melodic guitar and organ whilst the subsequent and subsequent Janet’s Song weaves these elements alongside the sound pebbles entering a water.

This is evocative music made thoroughly by humans with the most basic of tools. Unafraid to step away from their screens Maths Balance Volumes stroll with breezy resistance to the current thread of platform regurgitation.

Tonight flips the song on its side as a barnstorming melange of concrete hustle made from shakers, animals, humans and beelzebub knows what. Egyptian Wedding sounds like Still House Plants if they operated off the depths of a rotating well. Forming a round is a dusty scratchy heartbreaker that encapsulates the hybrid Smithsonian Folkways label approach that only MBV do.

There is something enormously human about Maths Balance Volumes take on underground experimental music, one far more so than the human pitched music made in the mainstream today. In the 20th Century it was the other way around. What has happened ? I will let you contemplate that. But for me, in this case explicitly this press scribe is chuffed at the consequence of this reversal. Very happy indeed.