Audiopile Review: Some groups start out determined to avoid musical clichés at all costs. Sonic Youth and Scritti Politti are two acts that set out with this modus operandi. As members of those legendary ensembles would doubtless tell you, this is a fundamentally unsustainable artistic strategy. It is, however, a great trial by fire in which to forge a unique artistic identity. And once that identity is set in place, you can afford to ease up on the ideology and let a little light in. This is the place Gastr Del Sol, the duo of Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs, had arrived at when it came time to record 1996’s ‘Upgrade & Afterlife’. Not that you’d know this from the formidable electro-acoustic drone of opener ‘Our Exquisite Replica of “Eternity”’. But this is followed by ‘Rebecca Sylvester’, which is typical of the cubist folk sound the duo has been developing, but may also be the most purely lovely song they ever recorded. Elsewhere, they seem like they’re actually having fun, as on the closing cover of John Fahey’s ‘Dry Bones in the Valley’, which features minimalist legend Tony Conrad. If we had to call it, we’d say this was their finest album. Uniquely beautiful.

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When placed next to each other, dueling concerns enrich each other and push the envelope into new, newer, and newest envelopes of a different color. Step inside this magnetic garden & sip on their exquisite replica of “Eternity.”