The “No Place for Us” EP is a three-song introduction to The Sight Below’s hopeful sonic gloom. On the release—his first for Ghostly—the reclusive, Seattle-based producer smears his waterlogged guitar in broad, oceanic strokes, swirling the haze around his tracks’ tantalizingly subtle electronic beats. It’s a sound that encompasses shoegazers’ obsessive tone layering, ambient’s mood-setting sprawl, and techno music’s horizon-spanning momentum at once. The EP opens with “No Place for Us,” a diamond-studded haze of hiss and pulse that recalls a beat-driven cousin of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops; from there, “With Her Kiss (I’d Pass The Sky)” sends distant foghorns floating over a tiny kick and hi-hat; and on the melancholy closer “Twice Failed,” the artist preserves time in an ether bottle, all bleary-eyed piano and glinting nostalgia.
