All Hands Make Light - Darling The Dawn

All Hands_Make Light is the newly minted duo of Ariel Engle (La Force, Broken Social Scene) and Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion). AH_ML weaves these two unique voices through lustrous tendrils of blown-out tones and drones, expanding on Menuck's eponymous modular synth work of recent years, imbued with an additionally searing, soulful warmth and melodicism through Engle's singing.

The result is a wholly compelling and spellbinding album of preternaturally genre-bending sonics and songwriting: a sort of electronic shoegaze suffused with freak-folk, kosmische, darkwave and post-industrial, conjuring traditionals sung in the haze of earliest light accompanied by overdriven circuit boards powered with ungrounded wires, thrumming with alternately tender and serrated beauty.

Sleepless anxiety/euphoria and a sense of somatic channeling is vital to these songs: "I wanted the melodies to be immediate and to surprise me, not a laboured process; it's about being a weather vane, guided by preconscious impulses" says Engle. For Menuck, the record started "with an idea of making a long thing about 'THE DAWN', the different weights of it's radiance, the way it kisses our dumb faces when we rise and leave the night behind, the heaviness of that light when you haven't slept." With guests Jessica Moss (Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Big Brave) on violins and Liam O'Neil (Suuns) on drums.

Heavyweight vinyl produced by Constellation Records in 2023.