The association of music and chemically altered perception is far, far older than Spacemen 3’s 1990 Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To, but the title of that record certainly crystallizes a particular feeling and approach. Listeners have no real indication what habits the slightly mysterious rest symbol do or do not have (outside of a description of their music as a “sticky distillate” in the Bandcamp description of rest symbol, and who knows who even wrote that), but the hazy, fractured, restless, beautifully cracked results of their work certainly suggests the music here is intended for, or at least welcomes, a level of impairment in its listeners.
Not that one needs to be high to enjoy this music, even as parts of it might make the sober feel like they’re catching a buzz. Trip hop is an obvious touchstone here, but not in playing the old favourites so much as taking certain elements of that and other genres (downtempo, broken beat, ambient, dub, psychedelia, etc. etc.) and leaving them to sizzle and warp in the sun. That’s the “sticky distillate” aspect of rest symbol’s sound, an apt way to gesture at the surprising potency of this not-quite-29-minutes. And yet in a world where practically anything can get called an “EP” or “mixtape,” it feels very distinctly like an album. One could separate out the gently crooning “Ascending Shadow” or the sudden pitch into Aphex-esque clashing beats on “Skin” or the rainswept Hollywood noir ambience of “Twelfth Hour,” but the real magic is how all of these tracks combine into a more coherent and seductive soundworld than acts working with twice the time usually manage to summon.
The trio are named as Molinaro, Moreiya, and Wendy Lavone, but little other information is given except that they’ve all had solo releases, and that Moreiya is responsible for the excellent singing throughout. This suits the way that at times rest symbol feels like a strange artifact from another world that has fallen into ours without a Rosetta Stone to interpret it with. The mirrored title conceit of opening and closing tracks “(rest)” and “(break)” seem to almost evoke a cycle, like if you let this play on a loop, it would match exactly. But the actual sonic qualities of both (faded vocal or choral exercises arising from a bed of drone vs. gracefully inscrutable singing over ticking percussion and mournful synth throbs) and the fact that they segue together no better or worse than any two random songs here belie that idea. And yet there is still an air of the ritual here (not an unknown approach in the world of intoxication); not for nothing is one of the tags on their Bandcamp page “devotional.” Devotion to what, one might ask; but listening with the right mindset and/or substances renders that question moot.
