Achingly attractive cymbal, string, bow, feedback splices cutting between each other and dripping with the kind of reverb that keeps your heart open, flashes of super-white heat like a coin catching the sun in church?super-languorous spaces for slow-drones and high-pitched glow, these worms cross-hatch on the windowsill! This must have been a joy to behold, you realise, when the applause breaks in like a dawn chorus, the whole thing is totally making an evening that stinks of raw paint and fingernails utterly worthwhile.

Serfs is duo Jon Collin & Tom Settle (Jon?s been playing a bunch of solo shows of late, and they both hang around in The Whole Voyald) and here it?s all treacle-thick acoustic joy. It?s recorded beautifully, the tones squeezed onto a tiny cassette, they?re folding over each other like wings. The B-side leaps for the Spring, sounds like one guitar being played by a four-handed man, delicate, trustworthy?a real revelation as I?ve only ever seen them play electrically, where there?s no less faithful interaction and attention to the merge and flux, but here the wooden surroundings knock on my sweet spot, they know the edge, and the turn. Each seventh is lovingly touched upon, each resolve a mellow transgression bordering on trust, kept from the claws of the disinterested by sweeping cracks and the strut of strings being chased into comparison, just lovely.

The image above is of the Serfs / Whole Voyald release on Lotus Birth, this comes wrapped in the same rustic cloth. 8/10 -- Evan Rhodes (8 April, 2008)