 In any relationship, it’s often what’s not said that lingers longest, taken from an encounter and rendered indelible. Texan four-piece This Will Destroy You realize this better than most instrumental outﬁts, peppering their material with dialogue that’s no slave to language, to vowels and tongues. It’s communication without bounds, expressive and emotive and, most importantly of all, highly memorable. 

 Tunnel Blanket is the group’s second long-player. It follows a well-received eponymous debut of 2008, a record that earned the band many an attractive comparison to post-rockers who, for the sake of the past being just that, will remain nameless here. But to This Will Destroy You – founding guitarists Chris King and Jeremy Galindo, bassist Donovan Jones and drummer Alex Bhore – the parallels were not so welcomed. Their sound world was theirs alone to inhabit, any coincidences just that. So, for album two, a new direction was inevitable, ties binding them to any scene tossed and forgotten. 

 Tunnel Blanket delivers the epic-in-scope soundscapes that followers of its makers’ previous recordings are accustomed to, but presents them in new lights – where once the sun shone down bright upon immediate tropes and traits, now their work is better suited to distant starlight, casting changeable shadows across vistas of inspired, ambitious ampliﬁcation. This is not an album to pick through in search of bold hooks and instant melodies. It is an ever-shifting, always moving work, which seems to evolve before the listener – spidery guitar lines feeling their way forth like vines scrambling up trunks in time-lapse photography. 

 TRACKLISTING 
 1. Little Smoke 
2. Glass Realms 
3. Communal Blood 
4. Reprise 
5. Killed the Lord, Left 
for the New World 
6. Osario 
7. Black Dunes 
8. Powdered Hand   


Little Smoke

Communal Blood

Reprise

01 Reveal

Christmas is All Around (from "Love, Actually")

my 3 year old daughter heard me messing with some vocal effects and wanted to try it out.
this is what she heard in her ears as she did it.

"here's something you want to see... it's my sister...
yaya, watch this!"

IrisAutoTune

This is my own new arrangement of "Saito's Song", a song from the repertoire of my taiko ensemble, Aozora in the Fushicho Daiko Dojo. The title simply means "Saito 2" and refers to the fact that this is, in my mind, Version 2 of the song.

I apologize for the extremely low quality of the shinobue recording. I recorded under very sub-optimal circumstances, sitting in my home using my iMac's built-in microphone. Normally, I would do this in my studio, but I just didn't want to take the time, as I wanted to wrap this piece up for my group to review.

What you hear is essentially the following ensemble configuration: 2 shime-daiko, 3 chu-daiko, 2 o-daiko, 1 gong, 1 shinobue

Of special note to music nerds: This recording features my first use of several techniques that I developed to allow otherwise "flat" taiko samples to sound huge, and to really capture that ensemble feeling that is so hard to describe, but you know it when you hear it. I'm happy to share my discoveries, so if you're looking to create some huge-sounding taiko songs in GarageBand, hit me up.

Saito Ni

Inspired by films like Braveheart and The Village, I wrote Candlesticks to encapsulate fragile and vulnerable moments, perhaps following suspense and or internal conflict. This score cue relies heavily on a soloing first chair violin to create a feeling of individuality, perhaps loneliness.

Instruments include: Audiobros LASS2 strings, slight percussive elements from Cinesamples Drums of War2, and Spectrosonic's Omnisphere for sound effects.

Written, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered by Zion Brock.

Candlesticks

Dynamite Dad

Groupies

Musician masquerading as a marketer in Phoenix

IrisAutoTune

krysvs

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