Review: Reese Williams - Long Tide

The fact that both tracks on Long Tide are precisely 24 minutes long suggests that duration is an irrelevant concept here. In actuality, they are snapshots of a cyclical infinity – an immortal momentum viewed through a mortal eye, its implication understood and its actuality never experienced. Both take the form of two gargantuan waveforms, surging gradually upward into the higher frequency ranges before being dragged back down into a rumbling bass mire, and from this point they repeat, compressing into a dim glow of low frequency and then blooming outward as a plethora of harmonic micro-reactions all occurring at once.

The cover art is apt; the music’s speed and breadth has no earthly reference point, sourcing its lifespan and endless, orbital path from the planets and stars. The circle, too; immaculate, symmetrical, inevitable and whole, matched perfectly by the music that moves in flawlessly smooth curves. Personally I hear a likeness to the unending respiratory rise-and-fall of artists like Chihei Hatakeyama, and it is indeed a marvellous sleep accompaniment, dragging a blissed out listener down toward an attainably slow speed of mind. Perhaps it’s more meditation music – a grand “smoothing out” of life’s unexpected creases and bulges into smooth waves of a continuous, ever-flowing synthesiser.