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Prefix.com Review of Twine
Truly a group for the tech age, Twine is much like the Books in that its collaborators -- Greg Malcolm and Chad Mossholder -- live more than a thousand miles apart and trade their material online. This, Twine's self-titled sophomore album, opens with two minutes of detuned and handpicked electric guitar backed by random dialogue and percussive bumps. Their songs come as collages, created from what seem like absolutely un-incredible moments.

Slightly off-key strings, missed notes and abstract vocal bursts introduce a distinctly acoustic flavor into their programmed world. Every noise undergoes electronic treatments but remains strangely personable, its strums and burps revealing their imperfections more appealingly than those of the electronic majority. At times, the wavering guitar notes require lyric-less melodies to balance their compositions, but Twine's lo-fi aesthetic prevents any new age embroidery from clouding the record.

The twelve-minute long "Kalea Morning" will divide the enthusiastic from the uninterested. Some will think that its shifty rhythmic afterthoughts and single hanging notes comprise a stunning ambient backdrop. Others will find themselves barely able to tolerate the continued drudgery. And both arguments have merit.

Those expecting the beats to take off and explode will be sorely disappointed, but Twine is decidedly not a monotonous bore. The most exciting moments of "Piano" are delicate: single reverse keyboard tones forming dramatic progressions amid ten thousand square feet of reverb. "Girl Song" is a rhythmic pattern built on the continual retuning of a guitar, set apart by the timed female vocal samples, which sound much closer to South Asian chant than any recognizable Western style (or language) and hum throughout the track with beautiful restraint.

Another standout is "Plectrum," where a repeated guitar chord sits punctuated by some of the only recognizable phrases on the album: "Good morning, goodnight" and a short rumination concerning "the guitar I'm playin' ... and the thoughts that I'm thinkin' ... and the words that I'm writin' ... " Twine seems to find several perfect moments when the single chord begins to grow old, and they respond by jumping key for one heightened phrase, only to immediately resume the first static pattern.

That the members of Twine very obviously do not just push the buttons and sit back helps them escape the chronic stagnation so unfortunately prevalent in ambient music. Their style nods toward traditional sources like Eno, Harold Budd and Aphex Twin while contorting their influence into an original variation. Realistically, this record will at no time become a staple for any sort of gathering without sessions of intense contemplation, but it rewards the fickle mind with surprising revelations.

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Milkfactory UK Review of Twine
Twine have constantly refined their sound since the release of their first album, Reference, four years ago, redefining the boundaries within which their music evolves and uncovering new grounds with each album. Greg Malcolm and Chad Mossholder met at high school in the late eighties, and after learning the ropes in a variety of rock bands during the nineties, eventually formed Twine. Now based far apart from each other, Malcolm in Baltimore, Maryland, and Mossholder in Boulder, Colorado, the pair have learnt to adapt and allowed Twine to evolve in a totally unique way, each member performing live independently as well as together under the Twine banner. Their last two records, Circulation, released on Swedish label Komplott, and Recorder, released on Bip-Hop, showed a progressive move toward extreme sonic abstraction, yet using traditional instruments to expand their glitch-ridden soundscapes.

With this fifth album released in as many years, Twine transcend more than ever the electronic nature of their music, basing the almost entirety of these nine tracks (ten on the LP) on guitars and pianos, creating elegant moody structures on which vocals components get trapped, looped and deconstructed to become simple components of the compositions. The electronic backbone is kept working in the background, bringing discreet textures to each track while at times, seismic percussions smash the ethereal ambience to introduce a mechanical element. A stark contrast from the austere abstraction of their previous album, Twine appears incredibly organic and pure, evoking the sonic affluence of My Bloody Valentine, the contrasted terrains of Seefeel and the dark meanderings of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2, with haunting touches of Dead Can Dance layered over luscious soundscapes. Scattered all throughout this album, the voices of Shelly Gracon and Alison Scola, in turn drones, mesmerising songs or lacerated conversations, develop as integrant part of the music, becoming simple sound sources. After a short intro in the shape of G_R_V, built around excerpts of conversations, Plectrum sets the tone, with a strummed guitar guiding intriguing vocals through the murky ambience created by Malcolm and Mossholder. The appropriately entitled Piano is reminiscent of the collaboration between the Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd on The Moon & The Melodies. Yet, here, the naked piano melody is draped in swathes of distortions, emphasising on the atmospheric nature of the composition as the track evolves almost imperceptibly. Whereas on Pendant and the LP-only Sbrent, Twine offer a collection of slightly more conventional ambient soundscapes, they build, with the epic Kalea Morning, a particularly haunting piece of music, mixing oriental and occidental singing over layers of processed guitars and syncopated beats, adding discreet glitches all the way through. As the composition slowly develops, it reveals more and more beautiful luminescent sonic touches swirling around an ethereal melodic cloud. The spooky Asa Nisi Masa is by far the most intriguing moment on offer here, as the pair assemble processed reversed vocals over a hypnotic.

If the use of processed vocals, guitars and pianos is not entirely new, the sonic landscapes exposed on this album are incredibly dense and denote the unusual approach to sonic structures adopted by Twine over the last few years. By far one of the most fascinating record released this year, Twine transcends genres like no one else.

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Stylusmag.com Review of Twine : Twine
Review of Twine : Twine
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On Twine's early releases, the duo seemed to be striving to bring subtle horror-film soundtrack darkness to the precisely sculpted, post-Autechre terrain of IDM. Their 1999 debut, Reference, featured manic, abstract beats and marrow-chilling atmospheres a la Witchman (a British producer who flashed brightly from '95-'98 and then vanished) and the evocative use of disembodied voices popularized by Scanner. From this disc as well as the 2001 LP Circulation on Sweden's Komplott imprint and 2002's Recorder, you sense that Twine's Chad Mossholder and Greg Malcolm are serious sound scientists who know their musique concrete and electro-acoustic composers, but also possess the soft-centered emotional capacities of the most heartfelt singer-songwriters. It's a rewarding combination rarely found in laptop musicians.

Recorder offered a yet more refined, subtle distillation of Twine's trademark abstract sound. They fed and manipulated guitars and pianos through software, lending an organic poignancy to the oft-sterile laptop-music genre. "None Some Silver" even verged on prog-rock, with its guitar tones stretched and ruptured like a John McLaughlin solo heard through a bad cell-phone connection, while "Touched" toggled between psych-rock bliss outs and Farmers Manual-style fractured circuit-board emissions and distorted, scattershot percussion. Throughout Recorder, Twine fused post-rock and IDM DNA to produce a superior breed of sonic ions whose microscopic actions coalesced into macrocosmic masterpieces of unusual textures and shapes. Much like Oval's Markus Popp, they found the beauty in fragmentation, the gorgeousness in the glitch. It was, quite simply, clicks & cuts for people who actually leave their computers once in a while and interact with human beings.

Twine's new self-titled debut for Ann Arbor, Michigan's Ghostly International is a triumphant culmination of the group's vision. The disc begins with "G_R_V," a red herring of a track whose tentative acoustic-guitar picking, static and a mundane phone conversation don't prepare you for the extraordinary music to follow. But track 2, "Plectrum," reveals Twine's unique modus operandi in full flower. Building tension with a tightly coiled guitar riff and a seemingly sedated asylum patient reciting a hypnotic mantra ("Get on, get on, was she?"), Twine deftly weave in subliminal operatic female vocals, haywire electronics, and a sample of a Southern gent discussing guitar and banjo playing. The contrasting voices and instruments create a pleasing cognitive dissonance. On "Piano," chords from that instrument are tweaked into a luminous digital glow, while a forlorn dirge, like Main scoring a David Lynch western, fills in the background. The track exemplifies Twine's penchant for crafting beautiful tuneage that struggles through a software-erected forcefield.

Twine's most interesting tracks feature the vocals of Shelly Gracon and Alison Scola (I can't distinguish who's singing on what, but Twine effectively deploy both in their spacious music). Album highlight "Girl Song" sets gossamer vowels floating over gently stuttering and shuddering pulses and plangent guitar twangs, forging some of the most ethereal blues ever. Deeply haunting and mysteriously beautiful, this could be a cyberspace collaboration between Mazzy Star and Ry Cooder. That it ends with spluttering, squealing tones of a Buchla synthesizer on the fritz reveals Twine's perverse side. Similarly, gorgeous, lamenting vowel emissions that sound like Dead Can Dance's Lisa Gerrard in a cave kick off the 12-minute "Kalea Morning." Nervous-tic beats and panned cymbal hits with metallic accents point toward Twine's debt to Autechre, but these traits are tempered by an enveloping Steve Roach-like ambient drone that aligns your chakras free of charge. The striking contrast between hectic rhythmic twitches and darkly tranquil tone floats again displays Twine's mastery of blending incongruous elements. Another brilliant use of the female voice occurs on "Asa Nisi Masa"; here, an Asian woman repeats the title words over rainfall and a lulling, Harold Budd-like organ fugue. Her sibilance and extended vowel sounds, combined with the slow-blooming dirge, form a hymn for an obscure South Pacific religion that even anthropologists haven't discovered.

It's utterly mesmerizing.

Pity the people who have to market Twine. This disc eludes easy classification, possesses too many dense layers, and covers too much arcane ground to be reduced to a pithy sound bite. While it contains chillout characteristics, the album also carries subtly disturbing undertones and rhythmic ruptures leaving listeners unable to completely zone out. Ultimately, Twine is best heard on headphones and with a clear head. You'll need that clarity to absorb the plenitude of rich details Twine magnanimously bestow.

Dave Segal