For a number of years now French songwriter and sound engineer Gilles Deles has been producing a body of solitary releases under the Lunt pseudonym, Water Belongs To The Night being the tenth chapter. Without wasting metaphors, this album fits into a category of pleasantly resonating artifacts created with coiling stratifications and modifications of guitar timbres. The press sheet compares the sonorities to those of Fred Frith, Lee Ranaldo and Rafael Toral; the music's refined weightlessness renders that statement politely hyperbolic, although vague superficial resemblances can be sparsely located. Perhaps one might hypothesize a long-distance relation with Aidan Baker's layers and repetitions, and Loren Connors' meagre melodic shards — comprising "wrong" notes left untouched — occurring over interestingly dissonant nimbi. In all honesty, though, nothing contained herein plumbs equivalent depths.

That said, if we're willing to avoid the sterility of the "name names" game and treat this CD as a measurement of the manifold features of altered strings, or just as a semi-discreet aural proximity, then Lunt is the man for the job. The nine tracks are seamlessly fused in 49 minutes, the atmospheres varying from delicately crystalline to menacingly misshapen ("Golem Of Fire" is particularly effective). I can't push myself to get genuinely intoxicated by the cleaner phrasing stuck upon the reiterations, but there's definitely a large audience segment around the world which will be appreciative of the different combinations presented by the program. The label's manifesto contains another somewhat immoderate declaration: "We, the children of the agonizing middle-class, we can still rely on the intellect, the lyrism (sic) and the audacity to give shape to chaos". If, aesthetically speaking, this is a totally respectable release enriched by a beautiful cover, this writer can't help detecting too much "middle-class" and too little "agony". In spite of the good intentions, Deles looks like a detached beholder of fairly uncomplicated processes rather than an artist set to pour his heart out "inside" the nucleus of an authentic motility of the soul. Even so, there are several moments which deserve to be quietly savored, such as the final "I Was Born In An Ocean Of Sound".