SITBON- UNTITLED
CLOAKED LIGHT / SITBON SPLIT (NO LABEL, 2010)
It’s refreshingly frustrating to stumble onto music about which you have hardly any information. This EP didn’t come out of nowhere, but google any combination of the words above and you are likely to turn up little more than a Japanese distro or two that used to have this CD-R in stock when it first appeared two years ago. No titles, no label, no apparent reason for it to exist except its high quality.
Peter Friel’s work as Cloaked Light has never done much for me, which is true here as well. (That said, his collaborations with Mike Pollard in Color Dream were full of tranquil, murky gestures that I still return to.) This Sitbon track, though, is something special, based around a loop that barely (if ever) changes over the course of its 12-minute length. Yet there is so much at play that you can shift focus from element to element and remain engaged; hypnotic and emotional, this is working on a deeper level than you could reasonably expect it to. Hard to believe this is the only music released by Sitbon, who, far from being a shadowy figure, appears just to be a buddy of Friel and Pollard and has a charming, dormant flickr page full of his photography.
