Hekura - Two Lonely Space Pilots

The best yet (no faint praise!) from Hegoa Diskak with this second album by Hekura, a Barcelona-based duo whose interest in modern minimalist composition is both remarkably accessible and astutely framed. Comparisons to Reich, Eastman and Takada might be immediate, but they're also hard won - those are not easy artists to stand beside, but Hekura are poised and thoughtful enough in their playing and arrangements to earn the comparison, often pretty, but never precious, their pleathora of ideas built from repeated patterns, experimental electronic vistas, and the interplay of reeds and strings, presented as a series of minatures that haunt the listener with their brevity. The longest song here, the six-minute-plus 'briefglimpseofclearsky', is an easily identified outlier, though it might also be the one I will return to the most, a lonely drone of lunar electronics overlayed with a poetic spoken word confessional that scans like the final broadcast from The Last Man (the clue to the concept might be in that album title) and therefore exactly the kind of goodbye-cruel-world kiss-off I keep sticking around for. It's an especially notable inclusion given much of the music framed around it is so efferersecent and joyous (note - NOT cheerful), which adds another layer of intrigue to a record that labels itself one thing (those Two Lonely Space Pilots) and mostly sounds anything but. To be alone and to be lonely are different things, and it's that dissonance Hekura seem to explore. 
 
FFO: Steve Reich, Midori Takada, Julius Eastman, Arthur Russell, Aqueduct Enesmble, Flaer