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Bowery Electric — “Over And Over” — Bowery Electric

The duo Bowery Electric loitered at the corner of Taoist ambience and haunted trip-hop over the course of a mostly forgotten mid-90s trilogy, kicking their thesis topic of nothingness around like an empty beer bottle.  ”Over And Over” delivers a deadpan realization of its title: a cascading six-note guitar figure repeats, sometimes with chasms of delay, sometimes with just an atom’s worth, between a fade-in and fadeout that suggest the loop is recursive, infinite.  Under that, a tidal bass.  And that, like the muttering of a quiet madman, is both all there is to it and merely a surface scratch.  It conjures a long Werner Herzog shot of an iceberg’s imperceptible approach, though I can’t say for sure if such a piece of film exists.  The absence of Martha Schwendener’s already heroin-blank vox just confirms that the big picture is being withheld.  It’s a lovely vindication for these unsung pioneers that this vein of post-rock has proved the more enduring, especially within the Kranky stable they helped define fifteen years ago: you hear it in Eluvium, Windy & Carl, Stars Of The Lid, Valet, Aix Em Klemm, Low and Growing, and anywhere else music is careful and strange and willing to tread water while waiting for the supernatural to emerge.            

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