The Helen Scarsdale Agency – 30th January 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
Cindytalk has been going almost literally forever, at least in terms of the life cycle of bands. A brief scan of my own archives reveals that the last time I wrote of Cindytalk was way back in 2013, covering A Life is Everywhere, released on the esteemed experimental label Editions Mego. The musical vehicle of Scottish musician Cinder, with an ever-shifting supporting cast, Cindytalk has been in a constant flux and perpetual evolution since the project’s formation in the early 80s – emerging from the post-punk scene and exploring every direction since, a career defined, as they put it, ‘by a continued process of disintegration and regeneration’. This is the very essence of the avant-garde, which was built on a manifesto that said that its function was to destroy the old to build the new. And implicit within that concept is the need to destroy its own creations in order to progress. Cindytalk has very much espoused that ethos over the course of the last forty years or more, with a career defined by perpetual reinvention.
Described in the press blurbage as ‘a labyrinthine opus, one that returns to the themes of the sacred and profane that have rippled through all of Cindytalk’s recordings’, Sunset And Forever opens with the eighteen-minute exploration which could reasonably be described as a (dark) ambient work. And it is dark. Spectral voices and spirits haunt every second of this unsettling drone-led work.
‘Labyrinthine opus’ is a fair description for an album which begins with a sprawling eighteen-and-a-half-minute ambient monolith, where falling objects cascade in caverns of reverb before slowly undulating drones gradually grow and turn. At times dense, at other more nebulous, around the mid-point, the scraping trickle of ‘embers of last leaves’ turns into a darker place, and is ruptured with percussive crashes and unpredictable extranea, while haunting voiced fade in and out through the swelling churn of abstract noise. This first piece, alone, feels like an album.
With seven tracks and a running time of around sixty-mine minutes, Sunset And Forever takes it time in exploring sonic contrasts, with graceful sweeps of watercolour synth washes underlaid with scratches and hisses and harder, uneven textures, the sonic equivalent of cobblestones underneath a velvet rug – or somesuch. Put another way, the soft and gentle is rendered uncomfortable by something altogether less soft or comfortable beneath, and hidden beneath a pleasant surface, and those hidden elements are reason to tread cautiously or risk twisting an ankle. It’s almost as if each track contains two compositions overlaid, a kind of collage or a palimpsest of a gentle ambient work and an altogether less gentle noise construction.
On ‘tower of the sun’, the dissonance and angularity rises to the fore to make for a skin-crawling ten minutes, while ‘my sister the wind’ screeches and scrapes, shards of drilling treble buffeted along by a train-track rumble.
The sound – and the meaning – of Sunset And Forever is forever just beyond grasp. For as much as the sounds and textures rub against one another and create discomfort, as a whole, it’s vague, indirect, hazy. It concludes open-ended, with questions unanswered and leaves a sense of uncertainty.
AA
AA
Aural Aggravation 