One striking feature of Sebastian Stier's music is its almost exhilarating physicality. Explosions of power and heft metamorphose into a buoyant lilt, into graceful stretching and expansion, or into gossamer surfaces whose pore-like indentations can do no more than gently quiver. Corporeal sounds grow into landscapes; fissured sonorities emerge from clumps of sound, from outcroppings, eruptions, breakdowns, and overlaps, and from an elastic, reflexional distribution of energy.

Isolated instrumental pitches or rigorously organized agglomerates of ensemble sounds sprout like appendages into sonic shapes, clogging, interpenetrating, and splitting each other apart. Yet they seem precisely manipulated and controlled at every moment of their rhizome-like existence. The harmonic and melodic forces they release are invariably held in check by precisely articulated rhythms that seize and direct the sprightly complexes of sound with a firm hand.