Ancient Romans

Sun Araw is the solo vehicle of San Francisco–based guitarist Cameron Stallones, an increasingly prolific underground mainstay who has helped guide neo-psych rockers Magic Lantern through a set of hypnotic, increasingly dub-steeped releases and has collaborated with artists as diverse as drone darlings Pocahaunted and reggae legends The Congos. *Ancient Romans* is the fifth Sun Araw full-length and, like all Sun Araw efforts thus far, inhabits a murky sonic headspace that splits the difference between the instrumental meanderings of krautrock mainstays like Moebius & Plank and the wondrous theatricality of some of Ennio Morricone’s more ominous, synthesizer-laden soundtrack work. The results are reliably mesmerizing. Cameron’s dreamy, rigorously minimal compositions never devolve into directionless noodling, and close listening reveals *Ancient Romans* to be a fastidiously constructed album whose luxuriant guitar and synth textures have the hallucinatory radiance of fever dreams.

A documentation of the long exit (the triumphal entry), moving the camera back 8 stages along the circumference of the circle to the point where the obverse is reverse, in order to celebrate the building of an edifice and then walk away from it in wisdom, gaining freedom from it.

Cameron Stallones' latest LP under the Sun Araw name is another fever dream of dub-mottled organ grind and guitar squiggle; at once elemental and futuristic, it's less a departure from than a refinement of his 2010 breakout On Patrol.

There’s a fine line between creating an ambient, sprawling tribute to classical antiquity and a soundtrack to the latest Civilization computer game. Sun Araw’s Cameron Stallones lazily strolls along that line on Ancient Romans, crafting the perfect atmosphere for his titular theme, and sometimes making interesting…

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Though 2009’s Heavy Deeds may be Sun Araw’s most widely-circulated album, it was last year’s On Patrol that really cemented him as one of the most daring experimentalists in the increasingly crowded and broadly-labeled genre of lo-fi.