Sometimes listening to S. Araw's Gazebo Effect feels like a beetle has crawled in your ear canal. Other times, it feels like you have water in there you can’t shake loose. Most times, it seems to render the ground beneath your feet a little less reliable. If you have spent time listening to records by the experimental psych outfit Sun Araw, the longtime creative project of Cameron Stallones, then these sensations will be comfortingly familiar. Stallones has chewed a termite’s path through the world, depositing a series of albums that, taken together, make a compelling argument for the virtue of prolonged disorientation.
In the past several years, Stallones has sought company to round out his music, which has resulted in projects like the FRKWYS collaboration with M. Geddes Gengras and the Congos' Icon Give Thank, as well as projects he’s given other names to, like Duppy Gun and Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group to set them apart. On Belomancie, he waved away collaborators like so much smoke from his eyes, bearing down on the most primordial elements of his often-already-pretty-primordial music.
Gazebo Effect, like its predecessor Belomancie, is an album of experimental psych that unfolds in increments, like you’re listening to the very first cell divisions of something that will eventually emerge into a coherent piece of music. It was recorded collaboratively, and live, by a new configuration of the Sun Araw Band, this time given the slightly tweaked name S. Araw "Trio" XI. The other players are Alex Gray (who is credited with "Computer Synthesis" and "Bamboo Saxophone") and Mitchell Brown (who handles "1/4" Magnetic Tape, Yamaha CP35, Roland System 100 Synthesizer). The energy they generate is not too far from Belomancie, in that it feels like a place for your ear to wander without a real purpose in mind.
This is unclean, septic-feeling music, and you can feel the hands and oils that have covered it and worked it into its current shape. "Upper Lawns" fills the space in your headphones with a synth tone that buckles out of pitch so wildly it’s cartoonish. In "Processional", a thin high whine flits around some glowing, jazz-inflected synthesizer chords, like a bug orbiting a flickering light. Nothing feels like it moves forward, exactly, more like you’re watching a few elements move in hard-to-predict, lazy circles. The long piece "Trellis" has several sections like this, all in its later portions, where a guitar line will ping so uncontrollably that it will zigzag over the one of two clear visible lines you thought your mind’s eye had established in it.
There is something funny about the fact that two tracks here are titled "Thesis" and "Rebuttal". For one, the piece called "Thesis" is 21 bleary minutes, while the "Rebuttal" is two minutes of relatively sharp-edged keyboards. It’s impossible to guess at either the thesis being proposed, or the nature of its rebuttal. But it’s clear from observing Stallones’ output over the years that he works with a target on the horizon. It might seem deceptively serene from the outside, but his music has expanded to vista and then shrunk to pinprick, from album to album, while remaining as steady as lamp glow. We are the ones staring, hypnotized, at the magic he conjures.
