As I've listened to the debut EP from Cyclopean, I've pondered the many meanings of the word they chose for their name, trying to figure out which one best fits the music. There's not one that really works. Where a Cyclops has just one eye, and therefore no stereoscopic vision, this music makes expansive use of the stereo field and the depth afforded by modern recording; where the cyclopean masonry of Mycenae is characterized by large, unwieldy stones organized in non-regular patterns, this is disciplined, orderly music with a steady pulse. Really, there's nothing big, unwieldy, lumbering, slow, fiery-tempered, or depthless about it. Perhaps they were referring to a cyclopean image, which is what the brain makes from the two inputs it receives from the eyes-- these four players do, after all, meld quite seamlessly into a unit.
The four in question, Irmin Schmidt, Jaki Liebezeit, Jono Podmore, and Burnt Friedman, have history together. Only Friedman and Podmore have never collaborated before, and Schmidt and Liebezeit are of course two of the founding members of Can, one of the greatest art-rock bands ever. If there's a single, crucial thing they've brought with them from that band into this one, it'd be a general creed of no ego-- though each is established in his own right, none of the musicians here ever hogs the spotlight. Schmidt's keyboard washes in particular are a bit like air, something you hardly notice but that you wouldn't be able to breathe without; they're essentially the sonic glue of the record, providing an amorphous foil to Liebezeit's terse and crisply recorded drum patterns.
There was a time when instrumental music like this might have been called experimental, but these musicians are a bit past the experimenting, and have moved into a phase of sonic mastery. They use prepared piano for the main melody of "Fingers", but they do it without calling attention to it, and the rubber band guitar that pops up here and there is played a little like a Persian tar, providing little figures that swirl in the corners of the rhythm track like dust bunnies stirred by the breeze.
These details and subtleties of sound are the main things that draw me back to Cyclopean-- these are songs that are far more about learning than feeling. They're played with skill and precision, and the sound is close to Bark Psychosis' Hex without the emotional anchor of the human voice-- it's that last part that keeps Cyclopean from being a record for more than just fans of the band members and their aesthetic vision. The overall effect of EP is like watching time-lapse video of weather systems or solar flares-- your awe at the complexity of it and the immense energy embodied in the events is tempered by the remoteness of what you're seeing.
