"He listens carefully to what you play, tries to understand what is special about it and then makes suggestions as to what could be changed to make it sound even clearer. "David is a very good listener," says Thelen. "The music is at once simple and complex," Bottrill writes at his website, "polyrhythms over melodies over thunderous bass and a drummer who can seem to split his own body in half to play in two or more different meters at once." And what a producer: David Bottrill, whose work as a producer and/or engineer, in addition to Crimson, Peter Gabriel and Tool, also includes time spent with Rush, Smashing Pumpkins and Dream Theater.
Recorded live in the studio with no overdubs, Black Light is as in-the-moment as it gets.īlack Light also represents the first time SONAR has recorded with an outside producer in tow. An integrated team of players who place music ahead of ego, guitarists Thelen and Wagner relentlessly eschew flashy gymnastics and even largely avoid the usual arsenal of effects beyond a touch of reverb and a bit of distortion Christian Kuntner is a lithe, dancing and eminently intuitive bassist while, at the same time, providing a potently visceral foundation and, despite mirroring Crimson drummer Bill Bruford's mathematical precision, there the similarities end as Manuel Pasquinelli accomplishes the seemingly impossible feat of simultaneously delivering multiple rhythms in real time. Thelen may cite Crimson, the compositional rigour of Nik Bärtsch, and minimalist composer Steve Reich amongst SONAR's more obvious touchstones but, just as its previous albums did, Black Light manages to come out of the gate sounding like none of them. Our track 'Black Light'-which was originally 'Black Light, Part Two'-also has some formal similarities with 'Larks' Tongues in Aspic (Part II).'"
"A lot has to do with the odd time signatures and minor intervals, but also with a strong emphasis on group interplay. "Larks' Tongues in Aspic has a very special kind of adventurous spirit which I think is not very far from what you hear on Black Light," Thelen explains. That's fellow guitarist Bernhard Wagner's solo on Black Light's title track to which Thelen is referring one of six new compositions that-with hindsight-were found to mirror the format of one of the group's most apparent touchstones, King Crimson, and its landmark 1973 recording Larks' Tongues in Aspic, which also had, in the days of vinyl, three songs per side.Īnd while SONAR's music avoids conventional song form, there's something about Black Light that sounds more like actual songs than any of the group's previous recordings. A musical animal that manages to engage the mind while hitting the heart and the feet (despite its disposition towards complex polyrhythms), to call SONAR "instrumental rock" is unfairly reductionist for a group whose purview extends beyond progressive rock into contemporary classicism.certainly minimalism.a subtle taste of jazz.and, on its latest album, Black Light, perhaps even a hint of surf music described by the group's primary composer, guitarist Stephan Thelen, as "Duane Eddy Meets Jackson Pollock." Rejecting the kind of guitar histrionics and posturing found in so many groups that fit within the general world of rock, SONAR's previous recordings-its two full-length albums, A Flaw of Nature (released on fellow Swiss Nik Bärtsch's Ronin Rhythm imprint) and Static Motion (the group's 2014 Cuneiform debut), along with the self-released Skeleton Groove EP and Live at Bazillus-set a high bar for conventionally configured twin guitar/bass/drums groups that few but SONAR's four exceptional members could attain.Īt a time when most guitarists' acumen is measured in notes per second, SONAR is, instead, the confluence of rigorously considered writing, collective restraint, and a sound instantly recognizable as much for what is not there as for what is. Far too many groups are described using the words "nobody sounds like them," but with Switzerland's SONAR, it's a description of rare verisimilitude.
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