Four walls of blue, pure in texture and colour. A serene Eno-inspired emotional catharsis which forms an abstract canvas for the ambient, low firing trippy music of Low 948. Creating an audio-visual backdrop which burns slow and intensely, it is a throwback to the kaleidoscope tunnel of the 60s psychedelic era when lysergic blotted squares became best friends with Timothy Leary and Alexander Shulgin. Deeply introverted and sombrely weird, this is music suitable for the mentally explored and serrated, but not for those prone to savage and paranoid mental swings and roundabouts. The album is the work of Steve D’Agostino and Stewart Louis de Canonville, two music producers of varied and eclectic musical backgrounds, more used to working behind the scenes with the likes of Gregory Isaacs, Horace Andy and Grace Jones. Featuring only four tracks, side A develops as a singularly one dimensional conveyor of moody melancholia, that momentarily embraces catatonia. From Psalm 7, Subbing II and Temple, this disturbed journey clunks and grinds, moans and sighs, machine metal against human emotion. This is electronic spiritualism created from the barest minimum of musical intervention, which forms the mainstay of this album. Avant garde or hippy retro? The key to understanding and appreciating this profoundly alternative ambient experiment is to listen through headphones. Almost tragically beautiful, its delicate subtleties can easily be overlooked.
Siobhan Sullivan
Low 948 offer incriminating evidence of clubland’s continuing dub theft, via attractive long playing debuts, The former’s Paccarisca (Kickin’) emanates from the Orb/PSOL/Coldcut show’s impressionistic twilight zone. The aquatic hi-life permeating ‘Subbing II’ sounds like a simultaneous scan of five different radio stations. The chilled out ‘Temple 8’ would provide the perfect accompaniment for the opium den scene in ‘Once Upon A Time In America’ – a symphony for breath and scraped metal.