Drawn, by Northern (CD on Infraction)

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Northern's debut offering, another in Infraction's sweet sleep-stream of supine-inclined ambience, are bros of Canada, Davin and Kevin Chong, dealers in heating up cool digitalia with toasty warm sample food. Drawn is a study in turning lost to found sound, capturing momentary guitar passes, and releasing them, subtly altered, into enduring motifs, finding felicity in the fleeting and making it stay awhile to become compelling. What happens is that this Northern music initially seems to drift by asking nothing from you, but you gradually find yourself, oddly, wanting from it. And it yields graciously. In being quiet, unwanting, you want to be quiet with it. It's the New Quiet.
 
The album opens with 'Coasting' in zones that distantly recall those charted by Loscil (Submers and First Narrows), the aqueous becoming a subtle leitmotif (cf. the later 'Pacific). The architecture becomes more digitally-enhanced, espousing sound 12k principles. Shuttle358, Taylor Deupree, and Fourcolor would all seem to be Northern touchstones, sharing a similar delight in deployment of small gesture processed loopstrata, fluting, floating, fibrillating – at once a surface over which to skitter a glitch-scattter and a cushion for repose. No fear of Northern exposure here at the warmer end of digital, gently meshing textures, lapping into laptop. It's a deceptively small sound that can get big on you, like on 'Migrate', which dwells in semi-stasis just long enough to lull, then spills over with swells before slipping out of sight. Drawn's digital means of generation takes on an increasingly naturalistic sounding aspect helped by its manipulated guitar-enriched intake. The guitar tradition drawn on Drawn is the ostinato introspections and plucked intimacies of 1 mile North, Labradford, and Dan Abrams (Fenton). Ostensibly different from Infraction stable signature sound, it somehow sits comfortably within it.
 
The first 150 copies come bountifully endowed with a bonus cd-r, Jessa, a collection which signals the next phase in Northern development, though the seeds of Jessa's future-indicative are retievable from Drawn's present-past. It evidences a deeper denser dronier zone-out music, minimizing digital intervention and renouncing microsonic patter. The gestures here are towards a half-light almost-orchestralism, moving from the likes of Marsen Jules and the secular sacral of Eluvium, shoulder-to-shoulder with the submersible slowcore starriness of The Lid (whose time of greatest influence and recognition has finally now come).

Comes housed in a mini-lp gatefold sleeve.

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