Peter Margasak at Nowhere Street: " Strands of Lunar Light [is] a heady work for multiple guitars in just intonation. [Frederik Rasten and Ruben Machtelinckx have] been working together frequently over the last couple of years, with the Norwegian playing on Porous Structures II, a superb quartet album with Leroux and percussionist Toma Gouband that I had the privilege of writing liner notes for. Rasten has been increasingly busy exploring this tuning for sustained guitars and I’ve seen him play solo surrounded by three or four different instruments, both acoustic and electric, laid out on tables, with another on his lap, but hearing those sounds interact with a second guitarist really heightens the psychoacoustic elements. In his liner notes Rasten writes,” I envision this music as emanating from a moon inhabited by otherworldly life forms and ecosystems; these sounds as evoking the moon’s topographies, beings, lunar rivers, and strands of light — as if this moon’s essence were itself sonic, vibrational matter.” He then goes on to break down the harmonic parameters of the music in painstaking mathematical detail, but more satisfying is just letting the relationships play out in our ears. Some of the guitars produce fixed drones with e-bows providing sustained tones over which Rasten and Machtelinckx play all kinds of peripatetic patterns, a kind of sonic topography that instills a deep sense of wonder. Notes dance around one another in carefully modulated sequences, forming a deliciously unstable constellation of intersecting notes, all of it swathed in thick haloes of overtones,as well as the sustained drones ringing out in the background here and there. The composition is a single, uninterrupted work in 12 parts, split in two for the recording, and below you can check out the second half, “VI-XII.” The album has been a regular mind-bender at home over the last few weeks, but I can’t wait to experience it in the same room with the guitars to gain a better understanding of how it works and how it feels surrounded by the harmonies."