Pretty much right form the get-go Sun Circle fill your orifices with drone. Sun Circle is Greg Davis and Zach Wallace and on this full length CD-R they lay out two lengthy pieces of drone, one pretty heavy, one almost mind bogglingly sparse?
Each has a pan-spiritual, unhinged nature paean feel to it, at least to me. Cut one, Golden One, is certainly the more jarring of the two, but maybe not the most extreme. A faint farfisa tone opens and is quickly enveloped by vocals, distorted singing repeated over and over. One phrase sounds like a high-end battle call mutilated by electronics while the other is more of a guttural moan. Both vocals at times sound similar to Tony Conrad?s raw electric violin playing, and the piece itself shares a similar mindset, long and drawn out, dangling from coiled innards. The piece carries on in this fashion, singing and farfisa drone for 16 minutes. And it's quite nice. Really some delirium-inducing stuff.
The second track is, in a manner, the same idea, but quite opposite from the harsh tones of the first one. The accent is on extended repetition but the sonorities are much more minimal. Golden Two is almost 20 minutes of bells and gong. After being dragged through the drone maelstrom on Golden One, you have 20 minutes or so to collect yourself, but you end up getting more and more confused all the while as the track unravels???a strum of the bells, a tap of the gong, over and over again. The two cuts are perfectly suited for one CD. The second feels at first, reflective or like an escape from the first. But really, it may be the more dizzying of the two tracks. It seems like it will continue on without end.
I?m generally hesitant to make generalizations about the inspiration for a piece of music drawn solely from a song title or the bands name. But here, what the band refers to as ?peace noise? could very easily be hymns to the sun, virile and spiritual hymns to the sun. Or acid. Maybe a tad of both. Either way, if you?re a drone fiend looking to get lost for a while, look no further than Sun Circle. I?m ready to slap on a long white robe and head for the fields to worship some sun. 7/10 --
Adam Richards (13 February, 2007)