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Online Architecture (Holodeck)

This Will Destroy You guitarist Christopher Royal King abandons the mothership’s expansive melodics for ambient sonic waves favoring atmosphere. At least on the surface. Close attention reveals more than barely altered sine waves. Processed more than performed, Online Architecture amasses everything from harmonium and guitar to bowed cymbals and Tibetan singing bowls and bends it to the will of the hum. Heavily coagulated signals emerging from amps and fingertips don’t float motionless in thin air. They flow, following a pulse only King can hear, moving up and over the currents like an albatross in slow flight translated to audio. “Shadow Harvesting,” “Clear Passage,” and a quietly intense “Tracer” take TWDY’s storm of orchestral power and compress it into a pencil-thin stream of dense melody. Online Architecture, no stagnant pool.

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This article appears in April 25 • 2014.

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Michael Toland started writing about music in 1988 on the Gulf Coast, moved to Austin in early 1991, and has inflicted bylines upon the corporeal and digital pages of Pop Culture Press, The Big Takeover, Blurt, Amplifier, Austin.citysearch, the Austin American Statesman, Goldmine, Sleazegrinder, Rock & Roll Globe, High Bias, FHT Music Notes, and, since 2011, The Austin Chronicle.