Published in LiP Magazine
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CROOKED CEILINGS
by The Roots of Orchis

review by Brian Awehali
12.12.04

The Roots of Orchis have been around for several years now, and they continue to expand their smart electronic "post-rawk" forays beyond the bounds of "genre-tongue" with their latest release, crooked ceilings. Sure, they're electronic, and sure, they're post-rock in that hackneyed, stale-as-a-brick sense that legions of music reviewers have been returning to endlessly ever since Tortoise made their mark. But what are they?

There are fragmentary pop melodies, loping basslines, gorgeously sad melodica-inflected keyboard interstices and enough dissonant minor atmosphere to draw you in before drifting off to some oblique and restless corner of your mind. Everyone has a blind spot-one in each eye-where the optic nerve "plugs in" to the photoreceptors on at the back of your eye. Nobody notices this blind spot because the brain naturally fills in the missing information, completing the picture. If there's an aural equivalent of this blind spot that's where you find the locus of the Roots of Orchis, artfully leaving enough space for your brain to fill in what it pleases, without coercion. What is your brain improvising in your blind spot at that moment? These moments transcend mediated reality and open up genuine spaces for us to move and flow.

The Roots of Orchis have, with only a few minor detours ("Hypoxia"'s sterile drum machine fills and few other missteps of that ilk chief among them) managed the elastic feat of inviting listeners into an extended improvisation.

If you want open-ended explorations of free space that will seep into your tympanic membranes; and if you like unexpected, oblique glimmers flittering around your periphery, helping you fill in your blind spot with oddities, then crooked ceilings is for you.

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