There’s someone I run into from time to time that I have a very embarrassing crush on. I think it might be more embarrassing that, despite the mutual awkwardness and my copious blushing every time we bump into one another, I’m not certain if she feels the same way about me, but such is life. Regardless, our little interactions happen all the same, usually all in a flurry after I haven’t seen her for a while, or when I’m in a strange ennui mood, and our lives seem to briefly synchronise. It’s like a shot of adrenaline.

In my youth I would have passed these things off as simply happenstance or coincidence, or perhaps even thought nothing of it at all, but I feel I’ve gotten too old to believe in coincidence. While I wouldn’t quite go as far to say that there is some kind of perverse force in the universe that drives us into these moments with others, I can’t shake some strange feeling that intersections like these are more than curious alignments of daily routine and more… orbital resonances of the soul. Or, some other expression that sounds like a less pretentious way to describe meeting people. Do we not, after all, have seasons or cycles of friendship? Do lovers not come and go as forces themselves?

I’ve come to see life as these looms of woven threads and of orbital planes transecting, people and things merging into our own allegories for a time. It’s in this vein of philosophic pondering that I approach Drew’s A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, filled as it is with a sense of story, of meetings and departures. Brimmed with hauntingly processed strings and winds, it feels not unlike a spiritual kin to the electronic brashness of FOUDRE!.

Harps appear in tight and tense pronouncements in opening “Out of Strength Comes Sweetness”, bees rising from the lion’s ribcage in careful and deliberate chords, the shape of a moment. It takes them some time to reappear in “And Lions Will Sing With Joy” as the mulch of cello and other strings keen with droning strangeness for much of its first half, allowing only a brief period of parallelism for them to coexist. It tilts away on fragments of voice and distant oscillations bending like inverted air raid sirens, some eerie warning or perhaps a wailing loneliness hanging heavy in the air.

“In Wound and Water” allows for a greater state of togetherness, forgoing much of the previously miserable fugue-like drones that bore the brunt of absence for something altogether more intertwined. The harp turns and dazzles amidst its stringed compatriots, each a display and a dance for the other: they share this space in time, turning about in the hope of something more, of the possibility of knotting and tightening into something concrete.

This turns into the surging, desirous heavings of “A Dream of a Cartographic Membrane Dissolves”, a tortured affair whose rising crescendoes of horn and string result in a disintegration. Probabilities decay, the loom disentangles and strands cut as that brief conjoining returns to a single thread once more on its own path. It cycles down quickly, more rapidly than its cresting undoing, and we’re left in the same silence that preceded pressing Play.

I return to dream of being woven.