Maar: Airelocks

Sometimes, the only thing that feels appropriate is to escape. Forever tangled in the web of this fast-moving world, fleeing is rendered impossible. One needs an agent. Something to alleviate burden from the mind. Not all records are the proxy for these impulses to disappear into your own world, but the closest thing so far in 2024 may just be Maar’s Airelocks.

The collaboration between Chicago underground stalwarts, Joseph Clayton Mills and Michael Vallera, Maar are the quintessential architects of exploration. Mills, a writer, composer and one third of Chicago experimentalists Haptic, while Vallera has, most recently, been sparking the senses as leader of Chicago post-punk behemoth, Luggage.

In Vallera’s case, while many artists move from guitar-based music into experimentalism, Vallera has gone the other way; his longstanding project alongside Steven Hess, Cleared, also explores beyond the borders (sidenote: they have an album out next month via Touch).

Visual Space: In Conversation with Luggage’s Michael Vallera

Alongside Mills, Vallera continues to tap into new reserves as Maar, making new ground in their voyage for purity. While the haunted house apparitions of Luggage are dotted throughout Airelocks, Mills and Vallera conjure up something that extends beyond that, with the kind of illusions that oscillate between worlds both old and new.

Take the opening piece, Keystone. An arrangement likened to looking at the world through frosted glass that separates these worlds. It’s a juxtaposition that evokes the kind of uncertainty telling of these times. The title track follows in what is minimalism that ebbs and flows with a scrambled sequence likened to a field recording captured from the belly of the ocean.

Then there’s Dust. With sharp bleeps and slow-motion drones, this track undulates through the labyrinth like a warm gust of euphoria. But not as we know it. There’s a transparency to the composition that acts like an endorphin rush, unlocking parts of the mind.

So too Indicator Species, an oceanic drone littered with random percussive clatters. It’s here that Mills and Vallera take the ideas of blue-collar labour, leaning into the working-class fundamentalism of their native Chicago. Naxos Gate follows a similar path, but here the pair go deeper into the vortex with a brand of greyscale drone that swallows the darkness.

Zelienople: Everything is Simple

Not a second is wasted throughout these recordings, and without an ounce of fat to boot, everything is etched to tape for a reason. It’s this fierce attention to detail that makes Airelocks the spectacle that it is. People have a certain idea about the ‘dreamscape’, but here Mills and Vallera turn it on its head. This is where ambient, minimalism and sound design coalesce into something that takes the idea of the dreamscape to completely different places.

It’s brought about by two purveyors that have meticulously explored the inner grains of sound. It’s open-source experimentalism where industry, environment, space and politics form a unique hybrid that is a rolling haze of new possibilities. It’s experimentalism that leads to purity, and with Airelocks Maar have delivered one of the most defining records of the year.

Airelocks is out via The Garrote. Purchase from Bandcamp.