Growing

This 2004 second release from the Olympia, WA, duo contains the sort of deliberate, gentle-to-enormously loud drone the band is most often associated with — three tracks that are between 12 and 18 minutes and one clocks in at 7:21 — with the instruments played (guitar, bass and drum) not so much played as turned on and allowed to gather volume over a long period. Shot through with elements of New Age (chirping birds, meditative synth washes), Growing offer a type of music that is neither noise nor metal nor indie rock, consistently challenging the parameters of how music is structured, and, at their best, offer a presumed aural equivalent to such elemental forces as light and fire, or even what the sound of plants growing may be, as their band name suggests. "Epochal Reminiscence" and "Anaheim II" are archetypal Growing songs, featuring the doubled sound of two amplifiers turned all the way up, with intermittent chord changes slicing through the hypnotic, layered howl of feedback.