Able Noise’s High Tide is an album forged from the pull of its creators’ distinct backgrounds. Baritone guitarist George Knegtel’s roots are in The Hague and drummer Alex Andropoulos is originally from Athens. It’s been shaped further by the pair’s shared studies in The Hague. Driven by equally varied sonic impulses, the duo have spent years refining a sound that thrives on the tension between sparse minimalism and bold, sweeping experimentation. The result is a late entry for one of the year’s most rewarding listens: a luminous debut LP that’s part fever dream, part intricate observation, and always perfectly disorienting.
Where 2020’s Recordings embraced a more fragmented approach to collage and field recordings; High Tide sees the duo expanding into a broader sense of space, shaped by years of cutting their teeth in improvised, site-specific live shows that shifted with the variables of each venue and audience. Now, they sound as if occupying a threshold between spheres, always in a state of pulling apart between grandeur and something gossamer, in a place where chaos and order dance in collaboration, folding time in on itself along the way.
At its core, High Tide feels like a meditation on just that: time, its dilation, its fragmentation, its weight. The album unfurls through shifting phases, where sounds become malleable and moments move almost infinitely. Opener ‘To Appease’ sets the pace, presenting a dazed march of tape manipulation and skewed, breathy vocals from Knegtel: “If the child we sacrificed to the sea didn’t work, I think we’re in trouble.”
It’s like a twisted hymn, the lurching tempo and the stretching of time pulling the song into a strange, slo-mo realm. You can almost feel the tape machine’s wheels (or in this case, a Sony Walkman) turning, pushing the sounds to the brink of collapse before gently pulling them back into place. The ensuing drone is supremely scopic, like the sound of a gale trying to penetrate noise-cancelled earplugs on a solo walk, cresting into a quiet, acoustic motif conjuring Gastr Del Sol circa Crookt, Crackt, or Fly.
The pacing and construction of songs here feel intentionally askew, where relief and unease exist simultaneously. On ‘Crickets,’ the duo offers an atonal weave of licks from the baritone guitar miasma. Here, what sounds like brass hits with the soft glow of an aeroplane’s wing lights lighting up storm clouds from within. The eight-minute peak, ‘Providence,’ is a spacious and intimate exploration reminiscent of Pram or Bark Psychosis at their most backwashed. It opens with the ticking of an oven timer from The Hague, a mundane sound that somehow feels oddly monumental. With all five drums miked and sent into separate amps, it could be a lost Microphones gem: dense, tactile, with room sounds and arcane static entering and disappearing in each channel like unsure ghosts.
It’s a snug, analogue energy that crests on ‘Boycott’. Its intricate, spidery guitar lines paired with tumbling drums summon the spirit of Sacramento’s instrumental rock heroes, Hella, but the track’s sleepy pace lends it a warmth and subtlety that those bands rarely reach. Here, the precision of the playing feels less like technical mastery and more like a tactile embrace: the deep sense of clarity within chaos.
What’s special about High Tide is how its chaotic structure never feels aimless. Abstraction is purposeful, and the disjointedness – tape manipulation, broken rhythms, slo-mo landscapes – stays in dialogue. Able Noise’s multi-track layering and diverse processing techniques create an exploration that is both intuitive and meticulously crafted. Guest musicians (violin, saxophone, clarinet) only turn up the contrast, entering and exiting not as distractions but as part of the same endless push and pull – sometimes peaceful, sometimes abrasive, but always searching for meaning in the gaps.
High Tide is not just an album but an exercise in control and surrender. The duo’s background in the arts (Knegtel studied photography and Andropoulos studied sculpture) clearly informs their approach to sound, one that is as much about the sculpting of moments as it is about improvisation and noise. This patchwork mentality translates Able Noise’s art-school sensibility into a multi-dimensional experience that acknowledges the limitations of time and place, yet refuses to be constrained by them. For me, that sounds like creation unfurling, untethered from any sense of finality.
