Wow! Definitely one of the best of ’09! Very organic drone. Might be a stretch, but definitely reminds me of Peter Wright—one of my fav’s. It drifts, it carries, it flows. Natural guitar drone sometimes supplemented with tape fuzz, piano, and field recordings. I can’t get enough of the second track, “Last Heights (Library Tapes Remix).” It is a soundtrack to damp summertime rural car rides laced with melancholy. It has a perfect solemn mood with a smattering of piano chords. The track would put the most ADHD listener into a trance, possibly to reflect upon the bigger questions in life. The entire set of nine tracks is purely faultless.

This collection demands to have its biography told, however. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Hardwick’s material for a new album was destroyed, yet something greater (?) rose from the remnant. You see he suffered the unfortunate catastrophe of a hard drive crash, which robbed him of his latest work. Instead of attempting to replicate his archetype, he had various colleagues in his art modify his previous work that debuted on a handful of CDR’s and tapes. So Xela, Library Tapes, Strategy, Machinefabriek, and Steinbruchel were lucky enough to get their paws on Hardwick’s offerings to manipulate them into a reborn form.

From start to finish this album feels genuine. Not an eclectic compilation that is only nominally similar, but one that is a coherent whole. I think that that’s one of the biggest strengths of the album. It gives you the impression (had you never known otherwise) that it is all from Hardwick’s own unadulterated genius. It serves as a coherent whole. A collaboration of individuality, yes, but only to present itself as a greater unified entity. One should not approach this disc as a sampling of various artists, but rather as a single, chaste tribute to Hardwick’s brilliance. The artwork makes this point pictorially. There are many leaves against a black negative space. Sure they are each a different color, but they are nonetheless all leaves. A representation of distinction, yet all cut from the same cloth. Absolutely stunning!
10/10 -- Dave Miller (30 June, 2009)