Jim Haynes, The Wire, November 2003

The ongoing EN/OF series from Bottop-Boy has been a curious marriage between the vanguards of visual art and music, as each EN/OF limited edition, vinyl-only release is coupled with a unique artwork from a respected visual artist. Price may be the prohibitive factor for the music fan, as a single edition from the series can fetch over $100 in a retail shop, and perhaps more through an art gallery. I can at least report that this contribution from San Francisco's Tarentel is a strong addition to the catalogue.

Since their monumental debut album From Bone To Satellite, Tarentel have been searching for an identity beyond the sum of their influences. Numerous line-up changes and false starts have been the downside to this existential crisis; but the upshot is that Tarentel have arrived at a very similar aesthetic space as the nascent post-rock forms of Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis in the early 90s. However, they have benefitted greatly from the miniaturisation of hardware, as the studio tricknology that crafted the respective Laughing Stock and Hex albums can now be actualized with the ubiquitous Max/MSP. Latency, which found Tarentel paired with conceptual artist Jonathan Monk, centres on the prowess of laptop jockey/guitarist Jefre Cantu. Rarely engaging the digital pixellation that is the signature of Fennesz and Stephan Matthieu, Cantu models the group's guitars, piano and drums into an overcast atmosphere drizzled with sadness and ennui. Blurred into distant mirages and ghostly shadows, the instruments float in and [out] of focus, occasionally emerging as recognisable plucks of sparse guitar chords or soft rhythms, but more often than not appearing as abstracted drones loaded with romantic metaphors.