Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Hammock: Chasing After Shadows...Living With the Ghosts

There are Hammocks you swing in. They lull you into a hazy dream on a hot summer day. Hammock the band might have the same effect on you, that is until that hazy summer dream becomes a mind- altering journey into an interior space.

Hammock is Nashville-based guitarists Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson. They've made their money writing country and Christian music but their hearts reside in the shoegaze sound of bands like the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. They had an under-rated Christian alt-rock band called Common Children that emerged from that sound. But Byrd and Thompson decided they liked the instrumental side of this sound and formed Hammock, releasing their first album, Kenotic, in 2005. Their recordings are full of densely reverbed, layered and distorted guitars.

After drifting off into the drone zone on their previous album, Maybe They Will Sing For Us Tomorrow, Hammock have returned to the more dramatic, melodically entrancing sound of their 2007 CD, Raising Your Voice....Trying to Stop an Echo. They've also returned to elliptical Zen koan titles, with Chasing After Shadows...Living with the Ghosts.

Their music justifies that poetic imagery. Each song is like a symphonic tone poem, but rendered in electric colors, assertive grooves and shimmering, sustain-laden guitars. They build from modal repetition: A simple guitar arpeggio is repeatedly deployed through reverb, delays and sheets of dappled distortion that moves with inevitability towards a grand crescendo.

Although Hammock create an orchestra of sound with their guitars, they also use strings, which give their music a hymn-like quality on "In the Nothing of the Night" and "The Whole Catastrophe." It's as if Estonian sacred minimalist composer Arvo Pärt plugged in, tripped out and found the spirit. Guitars have rarely sounded so celestial as they do with Hammock. Long sinuous sustains, orchestral pads that shimmer in cosmic reverb and melodies that seem to be carved out of a night sky make Hammock's music an immersive experience.

Hammock's guitar orchestra can be heard on their latest album Chasing After Shadows, Living With Ghosts. I'm John Diliberto and this has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.