Love Is Yes

Love Is Yes is the first album by Sander van der Toorn and Dax Niesten, an audio-visual duo de force of the same name. This heady debut is rooted equally in the worlds of fine art and experimental music. Sound and image meld wonderfully across 10 tracks, with shifting movements of music accompanied by a wealth of paintings and animations. Niesten's work summons the likes of Philip Guston and Maurice Sendak - with its crestfallen, cartoonish voids and cockle-warming grotesquery. Serenely contorted creatures are rendered on large canvases, and brought to fuzzy, maudlin life through a full-length animation that can be viewed alongside the record. Musically, the pair cite influences ranging from Vashti Bunyan to Morton Feldman. There is an ornate fragility, smeared by zero gravity focus shifts. Some glimpses suggest a corroded grail of Boards of Canada samples; motorik guitar, whispered messages, euphoric vistas and tangled memories all bathing in atomic glow.