Palermo-based Shaded Houses plays with time on the recent release “Family Trees”, a 5-track album stitched together from found sounds and musical elements compiled over twenty years.

Using bereavement and loss as a conceptual basis, and described as “a work of memory, absence, and slow reconstruction”, “Family Trees” is not a wholly mournful environmental soundscape. You encounter beauty in the strangely hypnotic voicings of “One (Minimally Conscious)”, which unfurl across thirteen-plus minutes of focused drone and the celestially ephemeral sounds of “Five (Ascension)”, with its long drawn-out and  sustained tones and minimal melodic structures appearing and then disappearing.

Contrastingly, the short “Three (Consolation)” exudes a stranger, off-kilter charm, and “Two” (Sometimes I Dream of England) deals in a drumless instrumental shoegaze, with distorted chords fireworking off against a backdrop of feedback and chaos.

But the emphasis is always on time. Shaded Houses plays with time in a way that is somewhat disorienting, but also potentially recalibrating, depending on when you listen. We can never slow time, but we can slow down the representation of it. Then, we can manipulate that representation to say something additional, in this case a sonic lament on loss.

“Family Trees” by Shaded Houses is an intriguing and explorative, sometimes secretly beautiful, investigation into the emotional resonance that accompanies facing the inevitable decay of our temporal experience.

★★★★