Timeless Waves

On his 2012 effort, Erdem Helvacioglu continues his explorations on electric guitar across six tracks named after particular emotions, alternating between, essentially, tense, more sonically violent tracks and somewhat calmer contemplations, best heard and understood as a self-contained cycle. "Fear" begins the release on an appropriately unsettled note, shimmers, and guitar scrapes advancing slowly toward greater volume and resonance like a collapsing old factory, with a series of echoed rhythms providing focus points for the empty, blasted arrangement. "Love" takes a different tack with acoustic and backward electric parts feeling like a slightly alien backporch contemplation, folk in the midst of buzzing electricity and droning hums — not quite a full fusion but not unfamiliar to fans of artists such as Flying Saucer Attack or Hood, nervous string parts settling into a contemplative comedown where only some guitar notes seem to emerge. Blasts of pickup feedback and dim but piercing screeches start "Anger" with further booms sounding somewhere between thunderclaps and the slow stomp of giants, controlled feedback contrasting with simmering snarls and explosions. "Sadness" continues the back-and-forth pattern of the album, with acoustic and calm electric leading the way over held back crumbles and other distant noises, an appropriately melancholy set of contemplations culminating in a drawn-out, morose hum. "Surprise" is more of a bubbling thing, clattering and rising and falling but no real "surprise" as such, which may be the point. But "Joy" ends up pretty much as that, with a sprightly, "up" sounding arrangement from the start ending the album on just that note. It's a quiet joy, perhaps intentionally, but the dramatic moment where everything falls away and then comes back in a reverbed sweep is a lovely bit of pop melodrama — especially when he then repeats the trick.