Artist

Towns of Five Hundred or Less

Drunken sugarplum fairies dance across guitar strings, synthesizers, and anything else within stumbling range in this no-tempo exploration of the difference between dissonance and the sound of crickets singing and rustling trees. If there were a game of concentration for your ears, this would be the picture you uncover.

Expansive and minimal, the outfit Towns of Five Hundred or Less calmly stipples brushes of tone color across a canvas to depict nocturnal portraits of subdued intrigue. On "Short Stories To Music," backwards guitars, xylophones, and decrepit air organs build mood with a potency and emphasis on the aural narrative reminiscent of John Cage's minimalism and the sonic segues of Gastr del Sol or Stars of the Lid. Sometimes soothing, sometimes disquieting, this somber track crafted from the ambient murmuring of typewriters and televisions is muzak for the paranoid.