Eight years after their last release, "Ballroom" on Thrill Jockey, this intriguing Wien-based trio of eccentric virtuosos finally came back. Silence doesn't mean each of them idled away their skills: I spoke about "Hoard", a solo-release by Joe Williamson on Creative Sources as well as his collaborative project "Weird Weapon 2" together with Olaf Rupp and Tony Buck, while I enshrine both Martin Siewert's "(Fake) The Facts", an impressive project with three drone-like sessions played with Mast Gustafsson and dieb13, and Martin Dafeldecker's collaborative work with Otomo Yoshihide, Axel Doerner and Sachiko M on Neos jazz as well as his releases with Radian and "Too Beautiful To Burn", an entrancing collaboration with Martin Siewert, issued in 2003. Maybe my association could be influenced by the circumstance I'm delving into Chekhov's theatre and narrative techniques, but the first track of "The Golden Years" could be a reference to so-called Checkov's gun, a kind of "coup de theatre", based on an element in the narration which initially could be without any relevance, but whose importance will be clear later, so that the role of the gun in "The Gun That's Hanging On The Kitchen Wall" could be played by guitar: the initial guitar strumming by Martin Siewert looks like an alarm clock, which arouse drums and bass from sleep, and in accordance with this vision, drumming could reflect frenzied bustling with kitchenware about preparation of breakfast while bass echoes that buzz in the head, which is the obvious hangover from sudden and undesirable awakening. Then music evokes the logical change of scene, where the initial outburst of the awakening gets to its chagrin in the surrounding world, a sort of self-programmed suicide of desires and will, an inference which is in keeping with Chekov's tragedies, whose tragic end normally implies some suicide. Following tracks are likewise mindblowing: stretched dissonances, sloped melodies, gruelling sonic interferences in "The Spoke and The Horse" sounds like putting a spoke in an old and hobbling horse's wheel, whereas the following track "Pisa" follows in Trapist's footsteps left on the occasion of their exhibition at "An Insolent Noise" festival, held in that lovely Tuscan town, where they interchanged sonic instrumental crack-ups and swarms with moody melodies, which let listeners slide into the mindblowing atmospheres of the final track, "Walk These Hills Lightly", where bass gradually rises over other instruments by weaving a kind of dirge-like blues througout a web of shaded percussions, electric hums and flashes, very low electronic frequencies and occasional arpeggios.