Pattern Is Movement

Considering the fact that virtually every band has access to or owns its own recording gear these days, it's surprising that adventurous and hypnotizing experiments such as Pattern Is Movement's album All Together are not more prevalent in today's musical landscape. Of course, assembling loops and adding loads of effects and atonal banshee yells is easy and all too common. But this Philadelphia duo's creations are not senseless, artsy ramblings but beautifully intense studies in theme and variation that take melodic or rhythmic figures and find unexpected ways to invert, contort and reverse their structures over the course of a concise three-minute song. The spastic, gyrating drum pattern that launches album-opener "Bird" builds in intensity through layers of harmony and keyboard lines before morphing into a soothing, dreamlike sea of pentatonic Eastern influence that calls to mind the impressionism of early 20th-century composers such as Claude Debussy.