Deep in a distant darkness that precludes the first few notes we hear in “Gravitational March,” there lies a wild, ambient beast waiting to come out of its long sleep and overwhelm whoever is within earshot of its birth. Staggering piano keys begin to swirl around us in this stunning introduction to Uncountable Spheres, the new album by Canada’s Marbyllia, but they aren’t the only obscure entity guiding our route into the night-like rhythm. It takes almost two full minutes for us to discover the consistency that will drive home the main groove in “Gravitational March,” but in that time, it becomes awfully difficult to turn away from the deluge of rich textures that are starting to fill every inch of sonic space in the air.
BANDCAMP: https://marbyllia-bg.bandcamp.com/album/uncountable-spheres
“Gravitational March” eventually gives way to a much lighter affair in “Our Sacred Troposphere,” but its swaying neurosis remains intact as we press on in the tracklist. The grooves are a lot bigger in this track than they are in the first song on Uncountable Spheres, and beside the supple ebb and flow of “Mesopheric Lights” or “Thermospheric Drift,” they might as well be the size of planets.
“Thermospheric Drift” in Uncountable Spheres is the most on the nose this experimental-influenced LP will get, and despite its most buoyant of beats, it too feels like something that was created inside the laboratory-like mind of a hardcore experimentalist. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Marbyllia is changing the game with this record, but he’s certainly affecting how closely I plan on following the Toronto underground in the next year.
Just past the halfway mark in Uncountable Spheres is when things begin to take a turn for the extreme. “Stratosphere in Distress,” the third track on the LP, slides into the void left behind by the intro tracks seamlessly, but the tones it will plow through here are anything but smooth. There’s a wonderful angst to the grinding in this song that immediately swept me off my feet when I was initially sitting down to review the record, and in the time since, it’s become one of the key focal points of why I think Marbyllia should be considered among the brightest young players in this scene at the moment.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Uncountable-Spheres-Marbyllia/dp/B0CNSR64M8
Uncountable Spheres veers in the direction of a smoky jazz nightclub in “Exiting Exosphere” before leaving us to be ripped apart by the clandestine assault of “Unexplored Worlds,” my very favorite track on the record. “Unexplored Worlds” almost feels like it doesn’t belong here – it’s sleek, chic, and lacking the gut-punch elements of its tracklist brethren, and at the same time, it concludes the record by bringing us almost full circle to the aesthetic frontier we began with in “Gravitational March.” Marbyllia isn’t making music for the bubblegum pop crowd in Uncountable Spheres, but for those of us who demand quality that’s a cut above in our ambient beats, this is a sound arriving at the perfect moment this late winter. I love what I hear in this album, and something tells me you will too.
Garth Thomas