Earth is the first of four EPs to be released by Sádon, a Russian duo that works with dreamy landscapes of sweet, sweet drone. It embraces the expanse of its subject matter in a way that makes sound escape, move from your speakers or headphones past your body and away towards infinity. It probably reflects our own manner of being in the world, confined, for the most part, by our architecture and social contracts, a manner of blocking the flow of time, wind, water, and plants as much as that of animals, a flow that is primordially pulled by the vastness of the unknown, by the possibility of a change that is perpetual. Likewise, this is music meant for horizons restricted to a little EP, a series of sounds which feel like must be followed through caves and the clearings of forests reaching only the walls of our homes and emphasizing the illusory movement implied by the glass of our windows.
Yet, the gravity of Earth is not quite completely physical (not entirely up to reverb); it draws its more potent element from the sparse, slow chords and the sharp, soft vocals (which remind this listener of both Pyramids and Gregor Samsa) that create an ambience of melancholy, an urge for the ever-out-of-hand, a certain resigned craving that imaginatively demolishes all barriers in the way towards unbridled passion. The tracks slowly shift, like seasons within minutes, always underlined by noisy echoes and electronics, at times clearly in the grasp of rhythm, and at others diffusing it so as to escape the passing of time. The shortness of the EP betrays its depth, not that of an ocean but that of looking forward over a field and sensing a breathtaking endlessness under the sun. It feels merely like a glimpse, a sudden realization, and suitably, like it’s not enough. It never is with music, is it?
Sadon’s debut promises really good things, and it shows that the artists have a very clear, interesting understanding of the sounds they are making in the sense that they perfectly return to a unifying feeling, a single idea of what the name of the EP and those of the tracks (even if a couple do remit to a New Age version of the idea, such as “Sacrifice”) might reveal about the Earth, which is in the case of this interpretation a way of exploring the literal greatness of a landscape often forgotten by those of us who look up and see only an attempt to move away from it, not towards the stars but the hearts of cities, where all horizons go to die. Hopefully, the next EPs, whatever their themes, will be just as intense, as deep as this bright first step towards everything. (David Murrieta)
a closer listen 