Sparkling Wide Pressure
Fragments of a Sound I Can Not Erase
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Frank Baugh has uploaded all his recordings under his Sparkling Wide Pressure guise to Bandcamp. That's a helluva lot of abstract drone to sink your frontal lobe into. Nothing he produces may ever quite better the ethereally magnificent Tearing Rippling from 2008's Touching Pasture on Students of Decay...:
...but Baugh has a very evocative way with conjuring drone that always hooks into somewhere deep inside you. From the opening bars of The Time That Is Right - complete with buried vocal and suddering background rumble - there's a resonance at work that can only envelop the listener (prediliction for Drone not withstanding). The intro is concluded with an even noiser version at the end, titled When The Time Is Right; it;s a thicker, gnarlier fuzzier sister piece the the start and close sout the album nicely offering a real finish that doesn't always happen with ambient works such as this that kind of just disappear off - but this one leaves its mak and echoes its start which is a nicely considered flourish.
The tracks are between 4 and 17 minutes long; meaning some drop straight into their peak soundspace, work it briefly then depart whilst others gently nudge at ideas before locking onto a definite course and picking out the ensuing details - if there was any one word to describe his sound it could easily be Pretty. Heard Through Window's drifting central tone is embellished by cleaner guitar lines sparking into life, whirling out in eddies of notes offset by glittering piano: The effect is efferfescent, like the neon shimmer in tropical seas. Opposite to the gentility of that, the penultimate track Journey of Forgiveness involves an almost chugging tumultuous turn on the bass end of the guitar, slashing tones and sharp licks of the headstock strings piercing through the dense channel of sound churning along, many moments of which bob up with a splendour that doesn't contradict the claim to Prettiness, but does provide a glimpse into the darker, uglier underbelly of which Prettiness requires to exist in contrast to.
He's a pretty prolific artist which a trip to his Bandcamp will quickly enlighten you. Start here though and you will only want to dig deeper.
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