- Given how experimental some of Tara and Mike Connolly's music is, Waters Above The Firmament, the second of their two EPs as Clay Rendering, is surprisingly poppy. Still, for all its hooks, the EP is as experimental as you'd expect from the former member of Wolf Eyes and his wife, of The Pool At Metz and the pair's avant-garde project The Haunting.
The four tracks on Waters Above The Firmament are delightfully tricky to pin down. "Myrrh Is Rising," one of its more understated pieces, builds billowing ambience, shards of high-frequency noise and murky vocals around a mournful piano hook. The instrumental title track works outward from a bleak, towering riff, minimal but powerful enough to dredge up deep-seated emotion. "Temple Walking" and "The Pest" are more uptempo, with sparse, violent percussion and scraping guitars that betray the influence of shoegaze and black metal. Clay Rendering have a knack for tempering extreme sounds with more vulnerable ones, so for every squall of distortion there's an agonised vocal or delicate piano. The result is an EP whose moods are as varied as its sounds, and that's never less than deeply affecting.
Tracklist01. Waters Above The Firmament
02.Temple Walking
03. The Pest
04. Myrrh Is Rising