If Big I Brave’s ‘Au De La’ was a minor masterpiece, this is something else entirely. Introductory experiment ‘Sound’ is eleven-and-a-half minutes of dolorous crunch-and-groan that makes you feel like you’re gingerly picking your way through a ruined Fortress of Solitude. This slowly tapers off into layers of lapidary drone, leaving behind a little more than a dimly flickering will-o’-the-wisp that threads its way through the aptly-titled ‘Lull’ before things creep towards a slow, luminescent climax. Closing cut ‘Borer’ seems to take the extremes explored previously and bring them crashing together, teetering and terrifying in its early movements before stretching blissfully out and threatening a final cataclysm that mysteriously fails to arrive. You get the impression that ‘Ardor’ has been constructed with painstaking care and minute attention to detail, and yet the results are utterly visceral. It’s a strange, powerful, enveloping piece of work, and if links can be made to Zu, Come, Swans and Blonde Redhead then they’re fairly by-the-by, since Big I Brave seem far more focused on creating a sonic and psychic space that only they are capable of inhabiting.
