The Infinite Calling is guitarist Daniel Turner, who comes at you with his various delays, effects, and looping pedals and a desire to burrow very deeply into your brain and set it drifting. Given that Vidya is a loop-based album, you can prepare yourself for a lot of phrases repeating in a quite unwavering way, but Turner is also deft at adding fresh elements and breaking the linear construct of his work here and there to keep it from going too stale. (We’ll get back to that.) Truth be told, once your head is firmly in the grasp of a track like “Centrifugal Spirals” and Turner has not only laid in his metronomic repetition but has also built his sound to an impressive density, you’re probably not going to be in any mental state to give much of a damn. “Ambedo” has the same effect, but Turner accomplishes it with a far lighter sound. Most tracks open with a fairly active phrase, laid down to establish the baseline. This is about the only place you really hear the framework before it starts to melt into the layers that are piled on top of it.”Shunyata” gets to a point where the sound all but spirals its way around your head, an oscillating tone like a glissando looped upon itself over and over. Turner takes bigger risks in sections of his four-piece suite, “Liquid Continuum.” Part I has moment where the sound burbles up suddenly, a temporary disturbance in the flow that quickly gets grafted into the heady wash. Late in Part II Turner breaks into a bluesy kind of riff that proceeds to go all ouroboros on itself. That lick, when it comes in, is a cool surprise. In all, the pieces all here do their job—they absolutely engender a bit of an altered state of mind, as hypnotic drones tend to do—and Turner’s playing and skill with looping is good. But this formula always runs the risk of getting too samey. When I’ve heard a track from this album come up in my shuffle, it absolutely holds my attention, especially in headphones. There interplay between lines is interesting to dive into for a while, and the brain-salving effect is pretty much unavoidable. But as a straight-through listen, its hold is less strong. Still, Vidya has been a good introduction for me to The Infinite Calling, and I look forward to hearing more. Get your brain ready for a bit of an immersion, and give this a listen.

Available from Bandcamp.