Critic's Review
Backroads Music/Heartbeats, All Music Guide
Kit Watkins's earlier works strongly reflected his background in progressive rock, but the second half of his last album SunStruck marked a distinct shift toward space music. On Thought Tones, that shift is complete, offering five abstract audioscapes designed to provide an atmosphere conducive to "creative thinking, contemplation, imagination, and other forms of direct and indirect perception." Always the experimenter, Kit Watkins has totally eschewed the use of keyboards of any kind. Instead, three of the pieces respectively feature the sounds of thunder, a dulcimer and saw blades heavily processed by electronic means, while the other two pieces were generated by analog flangers placed in a continuous feedback loop....At times reminiscent of Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening or Brian Eno's On Land, Thought Tones is a work of great depth and power, an evocative meditation on the paradoxical relationship between formlessness and form, and a masterpiece of ambient space music.
