Haynes is a man of many talents � music journalist, musician, owner/operator of label The Helen Scarsdale Agency � all of which he balances deftly, with a measured degree of clarity, grace, and no small amount of obvious imagination. Previous recordings have found him probing the vast landscapes of drones, organic, electronic and otherwise, fomenting environments reeking of disarming recognition and alien splendor. On Sever, his first recording for Intransitive, his knack for emerging the listener in all manners of bewitching head-states communicate some of Haynes' finest work to date.

The four untitled pieces speak volumes about how to do much with seemingly little. If Haynes is indeed looking to sever anything here it is a disconnection from tangibility, from corporeality, from whatever might approach the recognizable. Everything here is rife with activity, bristling with all manners of terra incognita and topographical affect. The first piece breaks out of a cocoon of scuttling noises like the cantankerous movements of some formerly hibernating, dormant insect suddenly reawakened, before distant oscillating bells and deep-drone electronics arise from the background. Things move forward at a methodical pace, Haynes patiently building his forbidding 'scapes carefully, mindful of letting certain elements proceed organically, clever enough to toss other, tinier events when desired into the admixture. Static these pieces are not: track two seems to begin with an ending, a bold swathe of hiss that irises open to reveal any number of galactic events (Budding novae? Encroaching thunderhead? The very sky opening?). At any rate, sounds barely graspable soon make their presence known, Haynes only allowing the smallest of their inherent mysteries to be revealed.

It is within this grand aura of abstraction that Sever musters its subtle power. Metals scrape on metals, gales bloom and bluster, entities beckon; on the fourth and final piece, the feeling is as if one is trapped within an immense wind tunnel while the very walls crack, seep and unveil their diminutive sprites. In this regard, Sever has its closest antecedents in Nurse with Wound's more minimalist escapisms (Soliloquy for Lilith, say), and, like Stapleton, knows not only how to draw you in but to keep you there; it's a helluva mind-bending place to be.