Reverse Image - Towards the Nocturnal Sun

Reverse Image is the project of Malaysian artist Siew Y'ng-Yin. Towards the Nocturnal Sun is their second album and first full album on Fourth Dimension following Tokokawa, a collaborative release with Thomas Bey William Bailey and the debut release of her noise project Fallen Sun. This is different though being a sophisticated and complex instrumental album pitched somewhere between sound art and abstract electronics created using analogue and digital equipment. Listening to this it is unsurprising that she has quickly established herself as a force in electronic music following a well received debut, The Silence That Does Not Exist and the aforementioned collaboration with Thomas Bey William Bailey. Towards the Nocturnal Sun posits a depth and maturity within its sculpted and shaped sounds, which is surprising for someone who came late to exploring sound experimentation, after years co-running the now defunct Mirror Tapes label.

From the interweaving patterns of chimes of 'Cerulean Dreams' through the slow unfurling layers of pulsing tones of 'Shadow Remnants' to the alien shimmer of 'December Voices' pitting disquiet with harmony there is a cohesion within the sounds used but the results that emerge from these compositions differ spectacularly. That's down to the unpredictability that evolves from these tracks seamlessly melding rhythmic percussive clangs with subtle processing underpinned in varied drone layers and textured atmospherics. 'Desert Clouds' darts to bleeping tones with an underlying arcing drone as it all takes on more of a soundtrack feel. Everything here is in motion, driven forward in a gushing sound generating unexpected turns crafting new shapes within an intricately sculpted sound.

Those aforementioned tracks are perhaps the most gentle and subtle formations of sound as the album delves further into more experimental and abstract areas whilst retaining its ability to surprise. The chundering block of dark sequenced sound that opens 'Invocation of the Abyss' digs deeper into atmospheric realms stretching out into a droning buzz shimmer. 'Haunted Firmament' is just otherworldy, an intriguing and unsettling assemblage of spacey whirr and whoosh as if scoping alien terrain against the rattling clatter of apocalyptic desolation. 'Shattered Binary', meanwhile, unleashes quivering processed noise effects which wouldn't be out of place in a modern day BBC Radiophonic Workshop scored episode of Dr Who. Much more abstract is the sound swirls of 'Transparent Timelessness' awash with metallic clinks and clatter over an atmospheric glaze drenched in bubbling aquatic effects.

Towards the Nocturnal Sun is an album that has to listened to in its entirety to fully appreciate its uniqueness but Siew Y'ng-Yin who was behind Mirror Tapes (The New Blockaders, Maurizio Bianchi, Conrad Schnitzler) has crossed over from running a tape label to sound artist with exemplary aplomb. If you hadn't got the message that this is a sound artist on a full-on creative roll informed by intuition and imagination it's hammered home on the clicking typewriter tones of the final track, 'Coda: Running Out of Time'. Towards the Nocturnal Sun is available on CD in an edition from Fourth Dimension Records at Fourth Dimension and digitally from the artist at Reverse Image Bandcamp