Presage is an LP less split than twinned, like stars, each side pulled into a mesmerising gravitational dance by the other's backspin. Black Dirt Oak and Jantar, siblings of sibilance and site, complete one another's sentences in a dark and uncanny psychic psalmistry. For their part, Black Dirt Oak stomps out a series of chthonic ur-grooves, filthy bare feet splintered by silicon shards and splashing in puddles of molten rare earths. They kick up a black angel dust of decaying carbon-based lifeforms mingled with that of pulverized electronics, and the plume rises into the welcoming embrace of this album's other side, its sky. Jantar unfurls their canopy in a processional of single piano notes, bowed mists and skeins of flute light as cirrus. Once adrift, the vapors and star-like entities synchronize and calibrate themselves to a mysterious lunar pageant, a watery and flowing tide of incantatory voices pulled high behind its own luminous gravity.

The two sides of Presage are distinct but describe in tandem the elemental contours of a shared world: namely, that of Black Dirt Studio and these musicians, some of whom have been recording here in other more familiar constellations for a decade now. Like the Dog Star Sirius, whose heliacal rising presages the wet season of planting and fertility, this twin system also rises, and hopefully augurs well for continued fertility and sonic flooding upon the plains of the lush Wawayanda region and this proven studio.

-Rob Smith

Out on the 15th June.

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