There’s a peculiar electricity running through By Wave And Wire, the new instrumental album from Hudson Valley experimental outfit Wilde Vier. Released via Island House in August, the record moves like a signal traveling through two worlds at once: half natural resonance, half circuitry and static.
If kosmische music is “cosmic,” then Wilde Vier is terrestrial kosmische, plugged into the landscape of the Hudson Valley, where ridges, river fog, and collapsing barns all feel like part of the soundscape.
The opener, “Map of 33rd Dream,” eases in with restrained pulses, as guitar fragments float through gauzy reverb while the rhythm section plots a path forward. What starts as hypnotic becomes insistent. It’s a dream the band keeps redrawing, but never resolves.
“Blue Drifts, Black Notes” leans heavier into noir psychedelia. Bass lines cling like fog to the edges of a winding guitar figure, and small electronic bleeps flicker at the margins.
Then there’s “Sir Lawrence Oblivion,” a title that prepares you for dissolution. The guitar tone is scorched, like a signal just barely holding its form before collapsing into noise. Mercel’s drums keep everything from spiraling too far into entropy, until they don’t.
At the center of the record is its gravitational well: “Poem for the Travellers (Twilight of Sovereignty).” The track is fourteen and a half minutes, and it’s a slow-forming storm. Gradually, the band finds a pulse, then abandons it with a sound that’s kosmische meets heavy psych.
The closing track, “Niagara,” is the comedown. It feels like exiting a tunnel into daylight, still electric, but gentler. After the vastness of “Poem,” its brevity feels intentional, a shortwave farewell.
What makes By Wave And Wire so compelling is its refusal to choose between the organic and the manufactured. The title reads like a metaphor for how the album operates, with the natural power of waves meeting the man-made circuitry of wires. Wilde Vier sits in the tension between them.
For listeners of Föllakzoid, Bardo Pond, Popol Vuh, or the more exploratory corners of Moon Duo, this will feel like stepping into a familiar but wilder forest.
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