Review: Dura - Living Color

It’s a rainfall of fingers and strings. Notes drop like petals detaching and plummeting, dislodged with the gracious swipe of fingers along frets, bouncing against varnished wood surfaces and tears of echo, splashing in the most gratifying shades of major key. I feel both the patter of individual impacts (micro-decisions, each rendered with care and precision) and the blanket pressure of Living Color en masse. The whole is constantly flickering with the bustle of the molecular come-and-go; harmonies bumping into eachother as they hurry elsewhere, like a train station ingesting the rush of a workday morning. Within the overlay of movement is the blur of ultimately going nowhere. 100 different directions cancel eachother out.

The record is split into two 20-minute pieces, which parallel eachother in their manner of evolution: commencing with fine, distinct melodies strung upon worn canvases of drone, before the ink bleeds into a smear of looped retrospect. Disintegration is an inevitability; single actions are dragged through time and subdivide as they embark upon the paths of opportunity. Living Color is a collage of quantum possible states, each translucent and humming with the optimism of all that could be. By the end of each half, I’m smothered in a spaghetti of rifted free will; beautiful tones that enact every possible ending at once. All of them, as it transpires, are happy.