High Aura’d’s “If I’m Walking…" is a two-act set; side A pairs thick, crepuscular drones with high-desert, post-rock/blues guitar riffage… and It’s nearly impossible not to think of dust and tumbleweeds, horse hoof prints, thirsty cacti, and an ambiguously poised sun parked along the horizon. Were budget (or ethics) not a factor, side A would come with a rattlesnake fang that still hosted some venom.
Side B (or at least the first half of it) takes up antipolar space, letting the drones (this time wrung from* deep inside a well-hammered grand piano) bear equal weight to Feldman-esque piano ploddings that ring and ring forever between phrasings, this all forcing hallucinations of arctic plains entertaining gentle snowstorms of nothing nothing nothing…until steel-string guitar comes in (again, spaghetti-western themed), adding a bewildering narrative of displaced coyotes rummaging through long-abandoned* Alaskan outposts.
This tape is a goddamn trip and a half.
and/or
— Jacob An Kittenplan
*presumably
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