AU - Both Lights

Step by step, Luke Wyland's visionary take on folk music has carved out its own creative originality, focusing attention on the cohesive elements within his wide-ranging stylistic ideas. The freak spirit tied to improvisation and a complex array of instruments first grappled with psychedelia on "Au", then with anthropological meditation on "Verbs", before shedding its more high-minded trappings in search of a more "physical" dimension through the electro-rhythmic reworking of "Version".

Au's music (pronounced ay-yoo) retains a free-form orchestral structure, welcoming remarkable flourishes of virtuosity poised between genius and madness. Trained in classical studies, Luke Wyland has gradually expanded his instrumental arsenal – ranging from piano to guitar, by way of banjo and samplers – while paring the project down from its occasional collaborators. The steady presence of Dana Valatka as his alter ego seems to have given Au's music the right coordinates to move and shake within.

Folk, acid-rock, jazz, psychedelia and classical music are among the fragments blended into this tormented kaleidoscope of sounds and rhythms. Luke and his companions push right up to the edge of what's permissible, then pull back, generating a flexible, eclectic sound.

The music flows and surges forward impetuously, marking out time and emotion with a chronological flow that feels anything but random: "Epic", for instance, opens up new scenarios, channeling harmonic and rhythmic elements into a mini-symphony that puts the project's full potential into play, while Colin Stetson makes his appearance with his shape-shifting, magnetic sax.

The music travels at two speeds: "Why I Must" is an electro-glam track with a dizzying rhythmic weave that pushes past the boundaries of sound, while "Go Slow" creeps in slowly, settling among fragments of Michael Nyman-style minimalism. Luke Wyland's voice is a languid, intrusive instrument, only barely tempered by the trembling softness of Sarah Winchester on "Old Friend".

The dense web of matrices and arithmetic constructions that take over "Solid Gold" remains tough going, with sonorities that invert themselves until Colin Stetson's saxophone arrives, dragging everything toward tribal folk.

Still, there's a virtuosity that feels slightly like an end in itself stirring through "Today/Tonight", or pulsing behind the robotic rock of "Oj", though it's always ready to sharpen its most avant-garde edges in ballads of raw lyricism like "Get Alive", which gifts us a noble duet of piano and bass.

"Both Lights" is the first chapter of a new course for Au. Their frantic take on beauty now carries a more penetrating physical force, even if the disorientation caused by certain stylistic detours hints at a drift toward self-indulgence, a step forward into more direct sound paired with an instrumental complexity that isn't always well defined. It's not yet the "definitive" Au album, but there's a thrill of the unexpected running through their agglomeration of sonic madness, one that risks taking hold of you.

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13/05/2012