GAJOOB Review by Bryan Baker:
Sai’s Though We Meet But Once opens not with a bang, but with a drifting sense of unease—like falling into a dream just as the walls begin to crumble. What follows is an hour-long farewell transmission of staggering depth and density, where tectonic slabs of guitar crush into spectral ambient drift, and time itself seems to distort and bend.
This is not metal in the traditional sense, nor is it ambient in the Eno-on-a-pillow way. Yasen Penchev (Sai) has built something stranger, heavier, more human. You feel it in your chest—an ache, a pulse, a sense of disorientation that is never resolved. Every track emerges as a terrain—slow, massive, and ancient-feeling—where low-tuned guitars resonate like ancient machinery beneath a canopy of ghost-tones and feedback mist.
The rhythm structures alone are a marvel. Instead of locking into grooves, Penchev constructs polymetric labyrinths: meters overlapping and collapsing in on themselves, only to re-emerge in unexpected alignment. It’s like trying to walk through a funhouse in zero gravity. Just when you feel like you’ve got your footing, the floor tilts. It’s this rhythmic instability that gives Though We Meet But Once its strange propulsion.
But what truly elevates this record—and what lingers—is its emotional core. Even at its heaviest, there’s a vulnerability present. The reverb-soaked delays, the barely-audible field recordings, the moments where everything falls away to reveal some small sound—a breath, a tone, a fading drone—these speak to loss and transience. The title isn’t just poetic; it’s the thesis.
As a capstone to Sai’s body of work, Though We Meet But Once doesn’t merely revisit past motifs—it seems to disassemble them, melt them down, and recast them into something unclassifiable. There are echoes here: of doomgaze, of the immersive soundworlds of artists like Tim Hecker or Nadja, of early Earth or Jesu—but none of those references quite land. Sai walks their own path, even as the ground beneath is dissolving.
Final albums carry weight, and this one feels like a monument—heavy with memory, yet already eroding. It’s music for the moment you realize the connection’s already fading, even as it happens. Rare, rewarding, and unforgettable.
Media: CD.
Visit Mahorka
Bandcamp URL: https://mahorka.bandcamp.com/album/though-we-meet-but-once
