Seasonal music, id est a music that could be fitted to or associated with a particular season, has always been a good deal and that's quite notorious to a lot of music operators since centuries: Christmas-related marketing specialists launching cds fillep up with Xmas carols, pop stars, official and unofficial religious institutions and even ancient Celtic bards and Hindi gandharvas seems to know that! And there're some nice attempts even among electronic musicians (think for instance to Martin Jules' Herbstlaub or as well as well as more famous ones by classical old composers (from Vivaldi to Prokofiev) aware of the fact that each season of the year could arguably have its own sound. This intriguing album well-crafted by the Canadian musicians Aidan Beker and Jim DeJong (aka The Infant Cycle) issue by the juicy industrial and experimental Russian label Zhelezobeton seems to be another attempt of giving voice and grabbing sounds from the intimate spirit of the four seasons eternally cycling in a year (even if nowadays pollution is slightly changing the natural rules... ). Rural Sprawl '“ what an elegiac title! '“ contains four tracks, one for each season, four states of the soul, which seems to be the acousmatic harvest from a mindful haemorragia derived by the squeezing of perceptive spheres of the musicians by help of a respectable kit including tapes, a bass, some guitars, a feedback generator, a sampler, some playouts and a thumb piano. Four tracks partially reminding works by Strings of Consciousness or Origami Galaktica, mainly designed on powerfully hypnotic overstretched drones enriched with entrancing binaural pulses and nicely sequenced sounds, skewing the audio climax. This sprawl starts with the flat loopline saturated by a guadually eruptive infiltration of an atonal sound sustained by fluttering rhythms and a follicular guitar tune, wholly exudating the memory of those sneaking summer noons and its intimate sense of stunning stillness. My favourite track '“ and just by chance my favourite season '“ is the one dedicated to autumn: the sense of suffocating oppression is reduced and a more melodic and melancholic (and sometimes moaning) tone permeates through the drone surrounding the listener till the end, when it turns into a strangled lovely guitar solo... Both Summer and Temperature Drop were recorded in 2001 and already release on a very limited CD-R by the Italian label Blade Records. In order to complete the natural cycle of this album, Aidan and Jim recorded two others in 2005. The first one reflects the lethargic savour of winter throughout a silently murmourous set of subtones, an hardly dragging kit of electronic sounds and pure jems of isolationist drones, gradually preparing the ground for the more organic one of the final track, an enchanting anthem with tiny sounds on majestic sounds waves, summing up the reflowering of natural elements normally marking spring-time in a captivating way. Very good record, highly recommended for brain machine addicts!