Omen

Omen is a 50-minute piece divided into four tracks. It undulates between delicate ambience and blown-out bliss, detouring for tender guitar and piano meditations. The gauzy ambient textures could come from the Mille Plateaux label; the swarming distortion clusters could come from Nadja or the Angelic Process. Transitions between energy states are both subtle and violent. The first track flowers into a tapestry of clean tones and lens-flare distortion; ribbons of white noise snake across the proceedings. A tornado gradually swirls out of the second track, while pensive piano in the third track grows into a tableau of distant oceanic explosions. Bursts of static act as invasive jump cuts, switching walls of distortion on and off like a radio dial scanning stations. Both the naked clean tones and the impressionistic climaxes recall post-rockers Mono. But while Mono unfurl huge sonic vistas, Omen is deeply intimate. Fragments of pianos and guitars slowly repeat like skipping phonographs; they're the aural equivalent of grainy childhood photographs. This is Half Makeshift's final work, and it's a fitting elegy.