Rotations is not so much an album as it is a soundtrack to some tripped out sci-fi movie that’s yet to be made. The tracks on this first full-length release from Mwvm bring to mind galaxies spinning, nebulae condensing into sheets of stars, and planets forming from swirling bits of dust and debris. This is what you want to be listening to if you’re high on mushrooms or some seriously potent weed. This is what you want to be listening to while making slow love on a water bed in utter darkness. It’s ambient space-fucking music, part Kinski, part Sigur Rós, without ever getting as anthemic or energetic as either of those bands’ music.
Michael Walton, the lone member of Mwvm, doesn’t utter a word on the album; it’s all ambient sounds and guitar tones, building and swelling, then disappearing into the darkness. Each track merges into the next, and one would be hard pressed to argue that any of the tracks are actually songs, but it is music, nonetheless—soothing and strangely meditative, like you imagine the embryo at the end of 2001 to be right before Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” kicks in.
