Cleared is a Chicago duo with fixed personnel but a morphing modus operandi. When Michael Vallera and Steven Hess started out in 2009, their music explored a spectrum between stripped-down rock structures and spread-out expositions of texture. But both of these guys have other places to rock; to name just two among several, Vallera fronts the band Luggage and Hess keeps the beat in Locrian. On Hexa, their third longplayer for Touch, the aesthetic compass that once pointed back and forth between poles now rotates spherically, creating a multidimensional space with a throbbing dub heartbeat.
While many of the album’s sounds were originally performed on guitar and drums in the duo’s practice room, nary a riff or note made it to the finished work. Instead, Vallera used those recordings as raw material. The duo’s played sounds have been broken down at the molecular level, recombined and built back up again to create pieces that are as layered as they are expansive. Take a walk in their fields of resonance, and the ground invariably disintegrates. But instead of falling in, you drift slowly through layers of exploded sound. Bass reports puff up like cumulous clouds, and string and metal resonance flex and flow like air currents. The closer you listen, the more you’re drawn into an expanse that seems boundaryless. [Touch]
—Bill Meyer