Growing - "Live"

This limited edition live album from drone duo Growing contains two complete sets from the band, one live in a club, the other live in a studio. The live set, recorded at NorthSix in Brooklyn, New York in July 2004, is the more sedate of the two. The set starts with a ringing guitar sounding hesitant tones before being joined by a magnificent organ drone that frees the guitarist (either Doria or Denardo -- the liner notes are maddeningly terse) to explore a musical trance-like state similar to what Spacemen 3 discovered on their Dreamweapon album. This segues into a similar but louder piece that ends abruptly by cutting the power to the instruments, and the resulting silence seems louder than the music that preceded it. Such is the power of the drone, and the heart of Growing's aesthetic -- the replacement of silence with an all-encompassing aural environment of beatific noise. The studio set, from January 2004, was recorded in the tiny confines of Free 103.9, also in Brooklyn. The claustrophobic nature of the studio is here reflected in a more aggressive (read: louder) set, running about fifty minutes. As in previous releases like The Sky's Run Into The Sea and The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light, Growing focus more on setting a mood than performing a song, and each piece here seems to end almost arbitrarily, when they could go on indefinitely. Having been signed to the Kranky label, and toured with the likes of Khanate, one would assume that Growing has thrown their chips in with the neo-noiseniks and their ilk, but this is not entirely accurate. Whereas groups like Khanate or Sunn O))) explore the space between the sounds they make with their instruments, Growing sounds more interested in the sounds their instruments make without too much involvement from humans, almost answering the Zen koan question of what air sounds like. It sounds beautiful.