Endlings - Endlings

Pitchfork 68

John Dieterich is best known as one-fourth of the daft art-pop outfit Deerhoof, though he’s also lent his impressionistic guitar thunder to albums by Colossamite and the Gorge Trio. For the project Endlings, Dieterich collaborates with composer and noise artist Raven Chacon—whose resume spans everything from KILT’s industrial sabotage to the multimedia collective Postcommodity, which presents work through an Indigenous lens.

Dieterich and Chacon first collaborated at the Albuquerque Experimental Music Festival in 2010, an improvised stew of torrid effects and unhinged guitars. Shortly after, Dieterich relocated from the Bay Area to Chacon’s native New Mexico. Endlings now bears little resemblance to that original performance. But they embrace abstraction.

At times, the duo surrenders themselves to a shuddering, violent minimalism, a sonic no-man’s land where it can be challenging to find or sustain one’s balance. At their harshest, they’re especially oblique: “I Make It Fall” crams dense, near-intelligible guitar scribbles into 73 seconds, “Legal Fiction” suggests a tuning fork tumbling in a gradually accelerating dryer. When the pendulum swings in the opposite direction, their results pulse with a no-fi glow that would have been right at home as interstitials on lost, ’90s outlier classics like Home’s Home X or Bügsküll’s Phantasies and Senseitions. On “Buried in Angels,” threshing effects and shrill whistles yield to sub-tropical waves of ukulele and keyboard.

Endlings is strongest when the band balances legibility with the ineffable. “Thought Signature” crumbles vocals over aqueous, bouncy keyboards. “The Devil’s in the Red Tail” pits watery guitar chords against Native American flutes. “Black Sabbatical” blends twin, turgid heavy metal riffs with claws, never losing sight of its hooks beneath the weight of compounding feedback and distortion. Every Endlings song offers a sneak peek into a distinct, unmoored sound world—one dizzyingly strange, free thread after another, genres turned inside out. With any hope, Dieterich and Chacon will be able to find the time and wherewithal to follow each strand to its end, wherever they may lead.