“Look at that empty chair. Something in it seems to be listening.”
– Nick Piombino

The sand of the beaches, the rush of the waves, the crash of the heavens, the prayer of the soul, the still-invisible future.

To and from a shadow, by rivers, to outershadows, with guitars that gently open, back and forth, unheard and unheeded, everywhere now, palettes built among the rainbow-residue, the only proof of a burst, a start of a trance, an excess, a supplement. Are Euphoria opens, technicolored in a blurred whiteness like a carousel, entering into our ears like lips in a mist, a white seam sewn wordlessly.

It has a richness that cannot be diffracted or pigeonholed in; it performs a scaffolding on the voice’s verticality. Together, Dustin Wong and Takako Minekawa have created an exquisitely vulnerable, finely responsive set of feelings. This album either wants you to meditate with it or wants you to focus your attention elsewhere, letting it commingle in the background. Because of that, it has enough breathing room to shimmy and sparkle, sputtering out a paradise of details as if to shake off identity, elude capture, create multiplicity, bask in protean heteroglossia, and mitigate evanescence.

Grey air fills the sound with light, drums as raindrops pronounce this endlessness, splashes of color drape the syllables. The gloss goes all ablaze, glowing from within, as if at the window on a page in Flaubert, still and sweating. We go inside this — the smudges, the labyrinth of suns, the festooning guitars, the glacial traffic of sound FX — feeling primitive and holy, sacrosanct and undomesticated. Are Euphoria dreams dreams that weld themselves to clusters of thought-clouds. A kind of hieroglyphic retracing, keen in this summer air, surfaces, lulled in by the world.