Glider

VINYL FORMAT. There's a beating heart buried in the wintry landscape of Glider, a warm 4/4 pulse that enervates the album's echoing, looped drones and pulls the listener swiftly through the snow. By pinning barely-there electronic beats to his wisps of guitar melody, the Seattle-based producer turns ambient music into a hybrid strain of breathtakingly intimate, small-scale dance music. There's a separation of elements in the Sight Below's songs that's almost meteorological in nature: tendrils of treated guitar trail lazy patterns in the sky like the Aurora Borealis, flicker in the distance like heat lightning, or expand and contract like time-lapse cloud formations; running along beneath, nearly obscured by the airborne phenomena, is an ever-present beat, which ranges from mud-puddle throb in "Without Motion" to tiny, insistent high-hats. The tracks evolve at a deliberated pace, but as the tones overlap and the rhythms build, time oozes to a halt and hangs in blissfully frost-bitten suspended animation. With Glider, the Sight Below has created a work of vertiginous sonic depth and exquisite melancholy: techno music for a dark winter's night.