New review by DARREN BERGSTEIN on Signal to Noise issue 55:
On the flipside, the trio operating as Skare (scare?) bring back isolationism with a vengeance, all dark ambient motifs aside. Like Aquadorsa, they have an uncanny knack for disorienting expectations thanks to a clever use of found sound, dialogue, glitchy crackle and a flair for environmental realism that also manages to dash cliché to the (frozen) earth. Solstice City, despite the barren, windswept, icy tundra of its cover, doesn’t attempt to ape the defrosted aural palates of Mssrs. Koner, Biosphere, or the Kubrick-desolate fantasies of the Canadian Cyclic Law crew. Rather, the pointillistic sounds, resonant with the crunching of geomorphic permafrost underfoot, twinkling and falling to earth in a light if foreboding arctic mist, attain their strong footing in your consciousness precisely because of their stark flavors. The 20-minute “Through Wind and Broken Ice” illustrates those two phenomena perfectly, using their obvious identifiers to expound upon landscapes comprised of snap, pop, the bleating of distant, lonely fowl, and air whipping through furrows of moist oxygen. Even better is the near half-hour “The Snow Angel Factory”: low-key atmospherics sit amid wailing cries from the outer horizon, where the props of a high-altitude plane becomes the lone humanoid interruptor piercing the “silence”, where a solipsist air develops between prickly decays of synth fuzz and tone shudder, resulting in regions fairly bristling with abject tension. The idea of simple “field recordings” dappled across digitized soundscapes is turned inside out here: the melding of the corporeal and incorporeal is near epic in its scope, and when the surroundings breach outright, multiple noises, one becomes uncertain where the studio ends and the reality of these febrile environs begins. Pretty awesome.
