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Ethan Gold's Expanses (Teenage Synthstrumentals) is the other bookend on his recovery from a head injury, opposite his recent release Live Undead Bedroom Closet Covers. A different kind of plumbing of the depths of his musical awakening, Expanses is an album made in his teenage basement, of gurgling, murky, imperfect lo-fi 'synthstrumental' paintings, which bear zero resemblance to the electronic music of today. Organic synthesizers hand-played and 4-track recorded, with titles that reflect his longing for the natural world, with references to lizards, insects, and mossy pools. Sometimes playfully driving with primitive drum machines, sometimes teeming with life as if the synths are going to give birth to algae and tadpoles, the album journeys through imagined landscapes of Earth and ends, in the last two tracks, in a cold and lonely place.