** 2021 Stock. Edition of 100. Glass-mastered CD in hand-stamped, recycled chipboard cover ** Like mad scientists of sound, sonic explorers Tim Olive and Cal Lyall met in a Tokyo studio in 2012 armed with hydrophones, magnetic pickups and electronics to record this richly detailed and slowly unfolding work, blending organic and mechanical elements of indeterminate origin, finding absorbing dialog without clamor or tumult; intriguing and engrossing.

I think I'd only heard Lyall a tiny bit on one of those Improvised Music from Japan collections a long while back. Here, he's credited with hydrophone and electronics and the resulting collaboration, while just as aggressive as (Brother of Divinity), does seem to contain a more liquid aspect, a friction-filled, granular flow, viscous. There's a great grind in play during the first half of the piece, though the interplay grows somewhat disjointed later on, even somewhat spacey. By the work's end, it's evolved into a wonderful, rich, swampy stew, entirely immersive. More fine work. - Brian Olewnick, Just Outside

…a sometimes choppy yet largely simmering transmission beamed in from another world - soupy, messy, comforting. A sparse, blurry drone that might be pure, ethereal atmosphere serves as the backdrop for irregular blurts of car engine choking, metallic clatter, tonal lowing and intermittent sci-fi echo. Industrious yet never overwhelming, Lowering emerges as an almost meditative experience: a loose net of willful miniature accidents to drape over whatever confrontational silences abound in the world beyond a pair of headphones. - Raymond Cummings, The Wire

From the onset, the 27-minute Lowering bursts forth with low-end agitated shudders and quick-fire spatters and scrapes and takes off from there. The two build densities and shifting layers plying bass-heavy rumbles, abraded tumults and shards of feedback in to a surging whole. Concentrated murmurs of crunching timbres provide a foundation of tectonic shifts against which the Tim Olive and Cal Lyall place gestural tracers of scuffs, creaks, percussive attacks, resonant reverberations and cavernous pings. (It’s intriguing to note that Alan Jones who did the mastering of the disc is a career undersea acoustician as well as a musician.) Pacing is also central to the piece, stretching out the velocity of activity to a seething crawl and then intensifying it back up to vigorous agitation. The two are careful listeners and while the arc of the piece is a whorl of motion, a sense of transparency is always preserved, allowing the multitude of sonic strata to surface and then submerge back into the mutable mix. - Michael Rosenstein, Dusted Magazine