Brendan Murray's Commonwealth is not unlike a Palestrina mass - devotional in feel, it sounds as though it could go on forever. As with such an event, underneath its surface, it is also a highly orchestrated and all-consuming experience. Murrary displays an understanding of the capabilities of his instruments; how they project sounds, not necessarily with force through propulsion and volume, but with careful placement of notes, be they loud or soft.

In this one forty-nine minute nod to classic minimalism, he also displays a level of comfort and assurance in how to go about incorporating and using time and space within the framework of a composition. Murray uses a small clutch of guitar notes through layered harmonics and concentrated, repeated figures. This spins a constantly evolving sound mass, charging the air around it in a way that gives it a similar feel to some ominous spatial architecture. That in mind, the change is perceived less as 'taking place' than as 'having taken place'. An in-between-ness characterizes the work, and Murray may be seen as continually maintaining a superimposition and extension of such moments, moments when the ear of the listener is not lodged in the previous tonality, but at the same time, has yet to completely touch upon the new one.

Ambivalence and ambiguity stain the air all kinds of grey, and as the composition continues, Murray's almost classical control of register ensures they are as vivid and clear as can be. As the piece reaches its zenith, though a long time coming, it thus nevertheless washes over one to great surprise, like some sort of cancer that has been festering inside one's chest cavity for some time, but whose official announcement is still destabilizing. After this, the album peters out like some geological dream-time music, immense in scale, though more diaphanous, and tectonic in progress. Commonwealth is more than a nod to Iannis Xenakis, Phil Niblock and their ilk - it is at once a homage and a placement of these traditions into a wider context.