One time I was in a fist-fight ? long story, don?t ask ? and I?d landed a couple, and taken a couple too, and then Time. Slowed. Down. Riiiiiiiiiiiight down, to the point where I was mentally focusing tight in on the swinging punches of my assailant at about 1.5 frames a second. And each breath I took was taking hours to draw and release, and the blood was deafening, banshee-howling as it sped around my body, hopped-up on adrenaline, spinning out on the corners and burning its tires in the cul-de-sac of my lungs. But then I started to hear little tiny melodies too drifting in and out of my mix; ghosting, skirting around on the fringes of my attention, as I was ducking and weaving and.. well.. this is the sound of "Paper Lanterns".

Punching well above its weight, Alex Cobb's Taiga Remains project returns with more deep-listening psych-drone - eighteen-and-something minutes of the exploded microverse of the sound of one breath. In. And out. But it's not some kind of yogic transcendental meditation, concentrating on one's inner being with one's legs wrapped around the back of one's ass; it's more along the lines of Popol Vuh being tortured in slow motion on some medieval device which has been contact-mic'd and run through a 20,000 watt PA. This impression is mainly due to the astonishingly loud mastering; astonishing chiefly in that it's Really. Fucking. Loud. Frankly, I've had jet aircraft land on my head, and hurt less than I hurt the first time through with this thing on the cans.

But really I guess it's bigger than the both of us; it's not so much about the single slow, calm inhalation and exhalation of you, or I, or that guy over there - nor is it the rattling echo of life-blood coursing through our arteries and veins and capillaries and pounding in our cauliflower ears and battered noses. It's the thundering, roaring of the stream of the protons emanating from the origin of the universe in its slow, deep, melancholic shuffle; expanding to fill all available space, and then collapsing in on itself again as it rounds final turn and into the home-stretch back towards the beginning of time. It's scored for acoustic guitar, voice and computer. It's the perfect intersection of drone and "harsh-noise". And it's really, really beautiful. 8/10 -- Young Savage (27 June, 2006)