Jeff McIlwain's work as Lusine has always involved the conjuring of imaginary sonic landscapes, but "Two Dots," the first single from his second Ghostly full-length, A Certain Distance, is certainly one of his strangest and most beautiful. McIlwain manipulates the sounds of flesh-and-blood instruments – the shuffle of brushed snares, a cloud of anxious strings, collaborator Vilja Larjosto's clear blue vocals – placing them in the same psychoacoustic space as gently pinging electronics and swarms of micro-samples. The end result is Lusine's "Two Dots": a sound-painting born of natural sources and electronic means, whose details seem to bloom like a forest of fractals. It's also a pop song with a hook you'll be humming for days.The "Two Dots" single contains two remixes. McIlwain's fellow Seattle-ite Dave Pezzner (of electronic duo Jacob London) replaces much of the song's rhythm track with a repeated figure on pizzicato strings, emphasizing the song's careful, minimalist qualities, while McIlwain's own "Reverse Engineered" mix flips the beat around, chops up the vocals, and turns "Two Dots" into something that wouldn't be out of place on a particularly forward-thinking dancefloor.
