Middle Earth resident Jonathan Dakers sent me a very polite email this morning that went like this:

“I’ve released an album with my band Ender and I’m trying to get more people to hear it. If you’re interested in checking it out, it can be downloaded from here… If you like it, please consider putting it up on your blog! Feel free to post part or all of it as MP3.”

Gosh, an album for me, all the way from New Zealand. Dakers went on to say there’s a physical CD version available through his own Darkroom Recordings, and he included a Rapidshare link to the record, which after long consideration, I’ve decided to share below in case anyone else feels like hearing something new.

Click here to download Ender, Ender.

The sound is a kind of psychedelic post-rock — entirely instrumental with a few spacey flourishes. Some crushing riffs, some echoey ambience, four tracks, none of them named. Pretty artsy fartsy, but not enough to be a pain in the ass. Easily worth the price of admission.

Despite the douchebag rantings of privileged US economists to the contrary, the world is far from flat, and so, when I listen to the sweetened, mostly-instrumental post-rock of Melbourne, Australia trio Ahkmed, I can’t help but get a sense of isolation out of the music. A certain loneliness. Even the title of their Elektrohasch debut, Distance, would appear to convey a feeling of separation, and all the more if they’re referring to the emotional spaces between things rather than the physical. Lonely either way.

Think about it: even with the album art above a single iris and the vast reaches of space are pictured, so what’s essentially carried across is a feeling of singularity in something much bigger than one’s self. Even if the sunrise in the pupil as we see it is a reflection of what an interstellar traveler is watching, there’s no denying the weight of cosmic motion is a humbling experience. That kind of thing is bound to make you wistful.

But the music has moments of gorgeousness nonetheless, and the heavily reverbed guitar of Carlo Iacovino and the warm bass of Dan McNamara provide no shortage of them. It’s a tone and technique you could take as far back as Kraut rock, but we’ve seen it most recently and most effectively of late with the likes of Red Sparowes and the neo-Neurot set, though Ahkmed are far less pretentious in their delivery. They refer to their style as post-stoner, and I suppose that works. Psychedelic post-rock would do just as well.

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