Sun Araw's 'Rapid Response' Is a Luminous Masterpiece of Patient Drift
The Sonic Breakdown
Rapid Response is a 12-inch EP with three tracks, each long enough to get lost inside: “Proper” at 9:25, “So Far” at 8:32, “Clear Tint Ether” closing at 11:48. Cameron Stallones recorded it at home in the Los Angeles Valley and issued it on Sun Ark, the label he has run since 2010. Jack Callahan mixed, JJ Golden mastered. Drag City’s sleeve copy poses the record’s actual question: “What are the pros and cons of being lost in a thought?”
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Everything rests on reggae’s unhurried gait — what Louis Pattison, writing it up as Bandcamp Daily’s Album of the Day, called “the leisurely lope of reggae” sitting “embedded deep in his music.” Boomkat heard the closer “underlined with sparing, depth charged subs”: bass as weather rather than riff.
The Spatial Dynamics: Pattison’s summary is hard to improve on — “This is music carefully calibrated to shine and gleam.” The reverb is wide, the delay is dubwise, and “the patchouli waft of New Age is in there, too.” On “Clear Tint Ether,” Boomkat clocked guitar and synth “fronded with seagulls and field recordings.”
Standout Performance
Stallones’ guitar. Pattison hears him layering “ringing guitar and warm jets of keyboard improv,” and reaches for a comparison nobody expects and everybody will now hear: “an avant take on Mark Knopfler’s fretboard dynamics circa Brothers In Arms.” Jon Leland drums on “So Far” alone, which Pattison calls “an effects-strafed jam peppered with digital percussion.”
Why It’s Certified
⚡ “Proper” is the on-ramp: over its nine and a half minutes, per Pattison, “it moves like smoke, expanding into a state of ecstatic bliss before slowly dissipating.”
🌈 The closer is the point. “But the closing ‘Clear Tint Ether’ is an intentional culmination,” Pattison writes — three pieces resolving rather than just stopping.
🌈 You could file this under chill-out and never think about it again. Pattison anticipates that and refuses it: “But there is a conceptual purpose to Stallones’s art.” Nearly twenty years on from the Not Not Fun records, he is still finding new rooms in the same house.