Pitchfork

"Freedom," at least when it comes to music, is a loaded word. Theoretically, anyone with a guitar is free to play any way he or she feels like playing. The same holds true for any other instrument, or combinations of instruments. But rare is the act that doesn't sound like the sum of their instrumentation. It's pretty inescapable: no matter what they do, no matter what they try, no matter what they aspire to, a guy with a guitar and a guy playing drums will more often than not sound like guys playing guitars and drums.

Where the California duo of Chris Schlarb and Tom Steck find freedom as I Heart Lung is not in their sound, per se, but in flexing the boundaries of all the potential sounds they can make. They shift, they stretch, they bend, they change form, they break rules, all in search of what feels right. And when they find what they're looking for, they move on to the next thing. If that implies restlessness, it shouldn't. I Heart Lung is experimental but still methodic, process music akin to watching the fluffy fractals of storm clouds shift and transform across the sky, or the tide rolling fresh waves in from who knows where, like clockwork but still different every single time.

It's no coincidence, then, that I Heart Lung have called their latest opus Interoceans. A four-song suite, of sorts, each long piece boasts an appropriately aquatic subtitle of "Upwelling", "Overturning", "Undercurrent", and "Outspreading". The disc aims less for the galvanizing effect of, say, such distant "free" predecessors as John Coltrane and Rashid Ali's Interstellar Space than it does for something more pastoral, even oddly blissful. It's also, despite the band's billing, only technically the work of a duo playing without a net. Schlarb and Steck reportedly recorded the disc's basic tracks together, but over the course of several months steadily layered and altered those improvisations with a series of overdubs and studio manipulations, occasionally enlisting ringers such as Nels Cline and trumpeter Kris Tiner to add their respective stamps.

While the general flow of the four extended movements clearly stems from improvisation, each is layered with more consciously composed embellishments. The results are a little like an artist switching palates halfway through a painting, reusing the canvas but leaving plenty of the original piece peeking through. It's been said that composition is just very slow improvisation, and Interoceans finds that line being continually blurred.

"Interoceans I (Upwelling)," for example, begins with a wash of feedback and rolling drums before shifting to folky acoustic strums embellished by what may be nature sounds-- rain, chirping bugs. "Interoceans II (Overturning)" features humming, buzzing guitar leads and trumpet over a meditative drone. "Interoceans III (Undercurrent)" nods to Asia, a theme continued in "Interoceans III (Outspreading)", at least until the feedback returns to redirect the music closer to where the suite started.

It's an impressive bit of sleight of hand, pointing the way one direction before pulling you right back to where you came from. But if the journey ends close to where it began, there's still a sense of distance traveled. And when the final notes of the disc's dim cacophony fade to silence, you're pleasantly primed for all the unexplored places this duo has left to go on future trips.