REVIEW: "Window In" by Michael Vallera

Michael Vallera creates dark room drone.

Window In is the new album from Chicago-based musician and photographer Michael Vallera. The entire album acts as a piece of scrambled drone surging through your speakers. It moves like space debris, hanging and sustaining. The field is wide.

Vallera has spent a career lurking in experimental music scenes of Chicago. He's released music as COIN, Cleared (with Steven Hess), and Marr (with Joseph Clayton Mills). Window In is the third album released under his birth name and third for Denovali Records, out of Germany.

The tunneling "Blue Mind" inaugurates the album.

It comes through like the halo-ridden soundwaves flaunting in the aftermath of a rocket launch. Vallera crafted Window In like a sonic blacksmith. The album's four tracks are disassembled and stripped back pieces of live recorded electric guitar, mished and mashed into a soup that never dissolves.

Outside of music, Vallera is also a contemplative photographer. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in 2018 his first photography monograph, "Wet Earth," was released by fine arts publisher Harmonipan Editions. The cover for Window In is a shivering shot of the Chicago skyline from a far-off shore with the day's light in submission. Cold waves below smack against the rocks in an uneven, but rhythmic pattern.

The album's title track is a meditation on twilight, breathing with the vibration.

The sound heard on Window In plays like film-developingchemicals as they clash and bubble making a toxic dispersal into the room. If it had a smell it might be that of rusted shipping container or a train track submerged in mildew. This is drone with a palpitating ghost pulse.

Window In is available March 27 on vinyl, digital and CD.

Photo by Michael Vallera. Courtesy of Clandenstine.

Photo by Michael Vallera. Courtesy of Clandenstine.