Maze Of Woods is the second album to result from a collaboration between Matthew Cooper of Eluvium and Mark T. Smith of Explosions In The Sky.
It contains eight swirling instrumental mood pieces without any distinctive hooks but with enough substance to transport the listener into a intriguing sonic territories.
These soundscapes occasionally drift into a haunting limbo-land with Moanmusic and Feeling The Sun Thru The Earth At Night being particularly spooky.
Synthy electro is dominant with Smith's guitar lines adding delicate textures rather than driving beats.
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Ghostly voices drift in and out to add to an atmosphere that the duo say was mostly inspired by Dennis Johnson's Train Dreams, a novella praised by Alan Warner for its "lurking grotesquery".
The echoing sample on Escapera, the opening track, is of a man saying "I wanted to do something that I don't know how to do".
Smith and Cooper, in contrast, seem to have a very clear sense of what they wanted to do and the wherewithal to bring this to fruition.
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