Bands are like the people in them; they tend to get set in their ways. But not Cleared. The sole fixed part of their method is that guitarist/electronic musician Michael Vallera (Luggage, Maar, numerous solo recordings and a swell duo with Lee Ranaldo) and drummer/electronic musician Steven Hess (RLYR, Haptic, Locrian, Slow Bell Trio) are both involved. They have the potential to like an instrumental rock combo and have often done so on previous recordings. But Lustres, their first for the Australian Room40 label, continues a process of ping-ponging material into diffusion.
One of the musicians collects, plays or synthesizes some audio, then sends it to the other. He works on it, adding and subtracting and atomizing the sound, then sends it back. The work gets passed back and forth using digital formats, some quite old, which ensures that the act of transmission can become another filtering event in the signal chain. It’s as though Hess and Vallera have found a way to port the principals of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room into the digital realm.
Some of the original sources are resilient and thus recognizable; there’s definitely a beaten gong on the title track. Others have been pushed beyond life but retain some original form, such as the murky bumps that might be ghosts of kick drums on “Shore.” But more often, the material has been so thoroughly disassembled and reassembled that it shimmers with life, reincarnated as a sonic expression of distance.
“Aubade” is bright and ephemeral, like an image of ice mist blowing off of a glacier that has been transformed into sound. “Far,” on the other hand, is titled like a warning; if you get too close to its steamy churn, you might get burned. But you might find its siren-like invitation to approach impossible to resist, since there are more sounds behind the surface blast that are shadowy and alluring. Deep and weightless, Lustres is an artifact of sound breaking free of form only to reconstitute as new music. [Room40]
—Bill Meyer
