Artist bio

This Bloomington, Indiana-based group has built a respectable body of work informed by Louisville post-punk outfits such as Slint as well as the avant-garde compositional panache of Steve Reich and Brian Eno. The instrumental trio of guitarists Dan Burton and Chris Carothers and drummer Rory Leitch favored brutal soft-to-loud transitions on its earliest material, encapsulated on 1996’s Pills Vs. Planes and the “Modern Gang Reader”/"Larkin" single, the latter of which inaugurated an association with Bloomington label Secretly Canadian. The group (and particularly Burton’s nascent engineering and production skills) had evolved significantly by 1998’s German Water, which teeters along the dream/nightmare soundscapes of such instrumentalists as Windsor For The Derby and Analogue. Ativin paused after 1999’s Summing The Approach, allowing Burton to open his own Bloomington recording studio and rear his more song-oriented Early Day Miners project, which has since released two excellent albums. He and Carothers, minus Leitch, regrouped as Ativin for 2001’s Interiors and plan to continue collaborating.

Albums by this artist

Summing The Approach (1999)

German Water (1998)

'Modern Gang Reader' b/w 'Larkin' (1997)

Pills Vs. Planes (1996)

Ativin

Summing The Approach

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» JONATHAN COHEN | SENIOR EDITOR

Ativin Summing The Approach Secretly Canadian, 1999 RiYL: Slint, Don Caballero, Windsor For The Derby, Aerial M

Some eight years since Slint's Spiderland forever altered the indie-rock landscape, it's arguable that any valid derivations can still be fashioned from its blueprints. To be sure, Ativin's members never denied Slint's influence on their music (indeed, the fact that both guitarist Chris Carothers and drummer Rory Leitch owned Spiderland was the initial impetus for the two of them to play music together). But over the course of an EP, a single and a full-length album (the band broke up in the fall of 1998), Ativin moved well beyond the pummelling soft-to-loud transitions of Slint and toward a highly distinctive blend of treated, interlocked guitar grooves, firm rhythmic manuevers and electronically-enhanced atmospheres.

All of these elements are served at precisely the right temperature on Summing The Approach, a posthumous four-song EP recorded by Steve Albini that serves as a satisfying final chapter to the Ativin novella.

Summing does not abandon the calling cards of 1998's German Water, which toned down the volume changes in favor of an emphasis on rhythm and structure. But the EP does mark a return to Ativin's more awkward side, especially on "Cy," which moves through several distinct sections with little regard for the listener's sense of balance. After an off-kilter intro, the band locks into the kind of mind-melding passage that made German Water songs like "Stations" and "Modern Gang Reader" so compelling. An abrupt stop fades into the submerged melody of "Riding And Roaming," before another sudden change spins into a disorienting mix of Dan Burton's "high" tones and Carothers' vaguely menacing low-end assignment.

As it evolved, Ativin developed a certain psychedelic edge (the press release imagines listeners in the band's Bloomington, Indiana hometown blaring "Cy" during a classic summer clam-bake session), indulged here with a variety of tape effects. The humming noise barely audible underneath the title track's minimalist riff foreshadows the next transition (as opposed to the far less subtle shifts on the band's Pills Vs. Planes debut), while the guitar tones on the beautiful "My Eyes Of Yours" ring like a wind chime in slow-motion. It makes for grade-A thinking music, and proof that you don't have to reinvent the Slintwheel to enjoy a ride on the post-everything express train.

JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"