Strange object, double CD (one called "Brother", the other "Sister") with a DVD to accompany the music.
Thirty instrumental tracks for 81 minutes of music,with no obvious progression or narrative content, mostly a collection of technical exploration of a previously definite style of guitar music.
You could make stylistic relations with post-rock artists like Collections of Colonies of Bees, Tristeza, Pele, Aerial M, Tortoise, Six Parts Seven, but you would fail at capturing the obsessional obsessional and minimal nature of a solo expression even if using the multi tracking option, if John Fahey had covered tracks of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra with a math-rock precision it could have sounded like "Infinite love".
Dustin Wong is, was and will be intrinsically a guitarist, electric with a selection of pedals, and the bands he played with, Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine were steps towards this more abstract and synthetic way of expression he develops here. He is working around repeated melodic pattern slowly transformed and completed, without giving too much care to the atmosphere, but working much more on dynamics, always playful, never really reflexive.
There are gems, but often too short and lost in the multitude, where melancholic & dreamy emotions finally take over the first role, and technique becomes an asset, in order to reach sensitivity, instead of a finality, like with the part III which is identical on both disks, parts VI, IX & XIII (which is the same as part XII of sister) of "Brother", and parts VIII, X, XI & XII of "Sister".
Less tracks but longer ones, with an intro and an extro, would have given more consistency to this album, but such wise may takes time and Dustin Wong is talented enough to be confident about his progression.
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