And finally Wyndel Hunt returns with Sunshine Noir, a new skin for his old ceremony of integrating melody and noise using electronics, acoustic instruments, field recordings, and the occasional piece of amplified trash (his words). His work is articulated in terms of a focus on ‘conceiving narrative, painting, and sculpture as analogues for structuring composition and shaping sound’. Compositional techniques referencing collage and aural painting, sonic sculpture are de rigueur. On this his fourth recording for DE Hunt’s edifices strain towards the steepling but their forms are constantly under threat of crumbling and combusting. Its eight pieces roll out the drones, riding on a storm of digi-pointillism, buffeted by soft-noise eddies, the eponymous elements manifesting in the MBV-distilled blasts of fuzz-tone buzz-drone sunshine of its surface and a certain core of dark and danger at its noir heart. Exhibit A: “Free Dissociation,” wherein Hunt’s ga(u)ze takes in Tim Hecker and Fennesz as he surveys the field of sound between delicacy and brutality, between pitched and unpitched, like a landscape painter wracked by visitations from a Pollockian paint-spattering spirit; sometimes a scuffed and fissured Pop Ambient notion – lyrical drift with edges frayed by the digi-noise-nik.
– Alan Lockett
Review
Furthernoise
February 1, 2010