The duo of Tom Shelton (laptop, acoustic guitar, feedback loops, vocals) and Ryo Ikeshiro (laptop, electric guitar, feedback loops), Ry-Om is the kind of project that inspires confidence ever since the very first listen, pushing our will to repeat the experience time and again. Theirs is one of the most exquisitely meaningful types of computer-based blends heard in the last ten years: evanescent implications and bell-and-whistle attitudes don’t belong here, structural steadiness and compositional rationality do - no questions about it.
Kaleidoscopic timbres and unstable frequencies aren’t used as an excuse for intellectual mystification, each element finding an ideal placement in the fastidious logic of a particular segment, linking its connotation with a far-from-foolhardy approach to the extremities of the audible range. Throbbing regularities - when existing - coincide with the shortage of directional lights, the music stabilized by an inherent consistency which makes us perceive it as rock-solid despite the volatility of some of its constituents. We’re offered apocalyptic droning ecstasies, bubbling marmalades, acid syrups, unfriendly integralism, entomic interferences. Sharp-witted interceptions remove the cancerous growths of sterile repetition in the right moments, at the same time introducing new factors of interest. When the infected physicality of the guitars is involved, its frail concreteness gets agonizingly mangled by the absolute nonexistence of canonical mercy, leading to repeated episodes of forthright hostility.
Thus here we are, numerous consecutive spins over a week’s span still insufficient to really determine what works so well for us to stamp the record with a seal of unconditional excellence, wholly justified and without reservations. Choice track: “3.4”, utter magnificence for ears willing to be horsewhipped by the redeeming values of tetchy dissonance and clogged up by the wax of reiterated enmity.
Creative Sources
