You know that dream you have every six years or so in which you’re standing at the edge of the world, surveying all that man hath wrought and not in the sense that we accomplished great things but in the sense that we ruined everything we had including each other, and you’re staring out across the slowly-changing dream topography and feeling alternating swells and ebbs of emotion as the greyscale and sunset hues coalesce into skyborn solids and rain back down in colors previously unseen and even though you have the vague sense that you are actually in a dream, you can’t help but think that the spider’s web of light before your eyes is too detailed to not be real? “Sunlightwater” by Disinterested is all of this.
Flowery prose? Sure, but stick with me here: each of us experiences music differently and each of us describes it differently. We use the tools we have—knowledge, understanding, vocabulary, emotions—to convey to others how we engage, absorb, and occupy the space of a song. With “Sunlightwater,” Matthew Brown gives us ample space to do all of this. In its tectonic shift from tone to chord, its sloped pasture of low end, and its occasional sprinkle of electronics, Brown provides us a lush river valley in which to lay, tiptoe, stare in awe, or run free. What happens next is of little significance just now, because we’re in the safest space available.