Sugarm - Songs About Guns

One day, I received a mysterious package in the mail. In the great DIY fashion it was an ordinary looking CD wrapped in an ordinary sheet of paper containing an excerpt from a book (or a lenghty essay) on communism, capitalism and insurrection ("Depose autorities at a local level", the header of one of the paragraphs says). The sheet of paper is inscribed only with the name of the album, the track list and the e-mail address for contact purposes. A bit of an Internet research has led me to gain some scarce information about Sugarm: his real name is mike, and he's a 21-yr old New Yorker who makes drone and ambient music for (self)therapeutic purposes. I was absolutely shocked to find out that he's not using any guitars in recordings, only keyboards and samples. Because the opening 11-minute monolith "Two-Winged Dove" will make you think of the loop-and-delay guitar masters with its sustained, ominous notes much in the vein of Super Minerals' "Hadal". There are more influences to be heard on this bedroom masterpiece, like the multi-layered, noisy ambient of "Cockfighter" and "Belt Pkwy Mama", which sound like b-sides from Tim Hecker's Radio Amor or the fluctuating minimalism of "Leaving the Sandbox", channeling Christian Fennesz and his Venice. Music like Sugarm's Songs About Guns makes me love my "job" as a blogger more and more, because not only I get to hear some amazing music I wouldn't have known otherwise, but also share it with others. Great, great ambient music, not as "wallpaper music", but more as a deep, focused listening.

EDIT: Actually, Mark contacted me after I've published this post and corrected me about the guitars - in fact, they're all over this album. Sorry for the confusion, everyone and thanks for correcting me, Sugarm! Enjoy the album!

 Songs About Guns