There’s a beating heart buried in the wintry landscape of Glider, a warm 4/4 pulse that enervates the album’s echoing, looped drones and pulls the listener swiftly through the snow. By pinning barely-there electronic beats to his wisps of guitar melody, the Seattle-based producer turns ambient music into a hybrid strain of breathtakingly intimate, small-scale dance music.
There’s a separation of elements in The Sight Below’s songs that’s almost meteorological in nature: Tendrils of treated guitar trail lazy patterns in the sky like the Aurora Borealis (“At First Touchâ€), flicker in the distance like heat lightning (“Dourâ€), or expand and contract like time-lapse cloud formations (“Life’s Fading Lightâ€); running along beneath, nearly obscured by the airborne phenomena, is an ever-present beat, which ranges from the mud-puddle throb in “Without Motion†to the tiny, insistent high-hats in “A Fractured Smile.†The tracks evolve at a deliberated pace, but as the tones overlap and the rhythms build, time oozes to a halt and hangs in blissfully frost-bitten suspended animation.
With Glider, The Sight Below has created a work of vertiginous sonic depth and exquisite melancholy: techno music for a dark winter’s night.