The lushly packaged Clear Skin consists of a single 38-minute instrumental piece which doesn't move forward so much as it expands -- built around an endlessly repeating programmed rhythm (Eastern in both its influence and texture), the music seems to be running to stand still, gradually absorbing additional layers of sound while remaining firmly rooted in its most basic ideas. Despite its ambient origins, Clear Skin does everything but fade into the backdrop of its environment -- depending on the listener's mood, it's either hypnotic or torturous, beautiful in its stark simplicity or unnerving in its excessive self-indulgence; either way, it's another fascinating statement from a group for whom provocation is much more than a marketing conceit.

Clear Skin review

by Jason Ankeny