First Glances – Treasure Hunt
Treasure Hunt , aka Dallas resident Myles Byrne-Dunhill , is one of more recent additions to the Moon Glyph roster and Toys Unatic his debut for the label.
There are few constants in this life, but when Moon Glyph promise psychedelic collages you can be sure they deliver. Toys Unatic comes with such promotion and it’s perhaps unsurprising therefore to be confronted with some kaleidoscopic portal to twittering electronics, lush plucked strings and disembodied jazz snippets. Naturally, there are captured sounds too – a unique element that always serve as an artist’s signature. Here, at one point they sound like a braying donkey and at another the eerie back-and-forth of a rusty swing in a downpour.
The opener “One Fungi” is as disorientating in sound as it is in grammar, resembling some drawn-out cinematic segue to magical dream sequences. Elsewhere, “Fornicators” is a narcoleptic slow boat that literally creaks with mournful strings, clarinet flutters and a late dose of anti-social drone that reprises an earlier fade to free-skronk noise. Most appealing to these ears however is the latter half of “Too Dew”, which seems to beam in from within the bowels of a waterfall, settling down to allow a ghostly moan to haunt the resultant hypnotherapeutic zen jam and bringing to mind the liquid laziness of Balam Acab as a result – only without a beat.
Toys Unatic is a beguiling tapestry that wrong-foots the listener at every step, closing in such fashion with the 13-minute odyssey “Tendon”. Chirruping with sci-fi synth play, possible thoughts of jazz-funk and all-encompassing cicada-like chatter, it, and by extension Treasure Hunt, are searching statements that boldly sidle away into the sunsets of galaxies far, far away.