Glim In The Mire is a five-track stumble of elements harnessed together in an odd mood with some random audio cables. An under-the-radar digital-only transmission from Frank Baugh’s (aka Sparkling Wide Pressure) other face, it’s the sound of someone fucking around within the limits of a self-imposed limited palette.
So with beats, guitar wreckage, snatches of abstract vocals, and electronic bass, Night Sky Body creates chunks of post rock / hiphop damage crammed into song structures. Leaning into a very loose hybrid of distorted samples and live guitar/knob twiddling, the record has a sense of pacing anxiety that mines downtempo dread. Tracks like “Large Flat Stones” (Two Lone Swordsmen vibes) and “Revealing Surface” (More of a Slint lean) have rust-sharp guitars on their last legs up against digital verdigris.
Baugh’s use of vocal samples, mostly unintelligible and contextless, gives the tracks a darker, meaner sheen. With “Feel Pass,” the broken speech with occasional chunks of distinguishable syllable pinballs inside the kaleidoscope sounds like sprinkled broken bottle glass. Occasional frantic strums on guitar are anchored/sunk by a slo-mo bass boom and a rattle of sample drum hits; the rhythms all have a nasty post-clinic visit swagger.
“BK Tips” walks the same line, a dial-created bassline and a dust-covered beat, more captured in the wild rather than pieced together, with the voice way down in the mix. Here the guitar is punished till it howls, notes boiling over into a digital spillage till it stalls.
Ending with the title track, a mini-universe of abandoned short wave signals falling to their death, the release ends with its loneliest moments even though this is one of the few places we can really hear Baugh; he even says the title clear as day. Tones jostle and plummet like lethargic fireworks then things go dead.
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