For their first album since 2005’s acclaimed Pale Ravine, the Norwegian duo of Erik Skodvin and Otto Totland, known as Deaf Center, moves beyond the low-fidelity experimentalism of its past toward a more vibrant veneer enhanced by high-end analog engineering gear. The end result is the spectacular Owl Spinters, eight compositions of shimmering black ambience that boast a powerful new sense of grandiosity and catapult Totland’s piano and Skodvin’s cello to an entirely new realm of treated majesty. Owl Splinters has the veiled optimism of an overcast sky with just enough clear areas to allow rays of sun to shine through; it brings the duo’s cacophonous fusion of horror and romance to its most fully realized incarnation yet.