Etching was originally a tour-only CDR, something Mountains, the duo of Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg, made live in the former’s studio before setting off on tour. It’s supposed to capture the spirit of their live sets, and if so then I have to go see them live if I ever get a chance, because it’s brilliant. They decided to release this as a limited edition (1000 copies) on vinyl, and because this review is late they’re probably already sold out. However, each LP came with an mp3 download code so there is no doubt in my mind that it’ll have found it’s way to more than 1000 people, and that if you look hard enough in certain places you’ll have no trouble finding it and hearing it.

Its one long track (45 mins) under the name Etchings, and it very much sounds like Choral (the duo’s last album from earlier this year on Thrill Jockey, get it now it’s brilliant) on acid. Hypnotic passages, wrinkles of bell-tone guitar, light rattling machinery (a spinning wheel a la old cine camera), those thick ambient worms winding around and around in amorphous figures, sun-stroke malfunctions taken from Kosmische, all that awesome stuff that gets released on the tape scene these days. In comparison to Choral it’s less interested in sweeping blissful atmospheres and more interested in micro reactions, by which I mean it sounds solid and whole from afar, but when you get close you notice slight abrasions and grain, like very fine sandpaper. So that as you get further into the track you get more and more into alien and unsettling lands, or like pulling very slowly back from a warm orange colour until you realize you’ve been looking at the sun, and that your face has been melting.

Or a better way of putting it might be that it’s like agitating in the dark room, encouraging the chemicals to react, and resolve an image on the film. Except the image we’re left with is blurry, unknowable, something beautiful, but never clear and legible, so the shades and shapes we can make out are the subject, their granular curves and lines.