Music Reviews: Category Archives
“Ambient” Archives
In Sea Remixes
by Various Artists
I’ll come right out and say it: I’m not a big fan of remixes. I understand the need and desire to pay some homage to music that you find inspiring and beautiful. And given our society’s predilection for recontextualizing and reiterating pop culture in general, remixing sort of seems to be the post-modern de rigueur thing to do. But maybe I subscribe too heavily to the auteur idea for artists in general, that the vision put forth by the original artist is the authoritative one—that it’s canon, if you will—and that other versions are, therefore, pretenders to the throne.
That’s one huge generalization, of course, and I don’t mean to whitewash all remixes in existence, nor do I intend to dismiss those with mad remixing skills. But again, generally speaking, if I have to choose between picking up an album of remixes, and getting an album of brand new material—either by the remixer(s) or the remixee(s)—new material will win out almost every time. I yearn for something new, something fresh, something original—and remixes just never quite leave me satisfied beyond the initial piquing of curiosity.
Which brings us to In Sea Remixes, a collection of remixes of Aarktica’s In Sea. And in addition to my normal dislike of remixes, I was especially anxious regarding this particular collection, for two reasons.
Drowned In Light
by Manual
When I last reviewed Manual (aka, Jonas Munk), it was for 2007’s Lost Days, Open Skies And Streaming Tides, a two-disc collection of b-sides, compilation tracks, remixes, and other odds and ends. And by the time I was finished with that release, I concluded, or at least hoped, that it was a harbinger of sorts, that it represented a desire by Munk to clear out any musical baggage and start exploring some new sonic territory.
As much as I like Munk’s music in spirit and theory, the truth is that a little bit of Manual goes a long way for me. I love his ethereal guitars and instrumental soundscapes, but they’re so smooth and crisp, so polished and well-produced, that they’ve always blended together in the long run. As such, I found myself eagerly anticipating something truly new from the guy.
2008 brought us Confluence, another one of Manual’s more ambient-minded releases—and his weakest of that sort (I’ve always preferred 2004’s The North Shore for my Manual bliss-out moments). But now it’s 2010 and Drowned In Light is here, and it represents the first real evidence that Munk is venturing towards a new place, musically. Which makes the album fascinating but also frustrating, because he’s not there yet.
Slow Motion Breath Forward
by Talik
Cory Zaradur, who is one half of Language of Landscape—I reviewed their Memories Fade Under A Shallow Autumn Snow earlier in the month—recently let me know about Talik, his collaboration with Musk’oakA. You could lump Talik in with Language of Landscape, since they’re both “ambient” projects, but that’d be really quite lazy of you. Sure, Slow Motion Breath Forward has plenty of ethereal guitars and drifting textures throughout its five songs, but even a cursory listen will reveal that Talik quickly goes in a very different direction.
Memories Fade Under A Shallow Autumn Snow
by Language of Landscape
It’s the middle of March, and we’re finally experiencing a gorgeous spring day here in Lincoln. The skies are blue and full of sunshine, kids are in the park, and the temperature is in the mid-60s. In other words, about as perfect a day as you can imagine, and you’d think I’d be enjoying some appropriately shiny, jangly music full of cheery hooks and effervescent melodies. But if you’ve any knowledge of the music that Opus has tended to focus on over the last few years, then it shouldn’t really surprise you that I’m listening to an album entitled Memories Fade Under A Shallow Autumn Snow, and yes, it sounds like you think it would based on the title alone.
Working under the Language of Landscape moniker, Chris Tenz and Cory Zaradur bring together the austere ambience of Stars of the Lid with the similar austerity that can be heard in Arvo Pärt and Max Richter’s most sublime compositions. The result is music that slowly envelopes the listener with gentle guitar drones and sparse-yet-evocative piano arrangements, that slowly drifts down around you like, well, a shallow autumn snow.
Kairos
by Caul
I’ve been a fan of Caul’s (aka Brett Smith) music for some time now, ever since I got The Sound of Faith back in the mid 1990s. Like Raison d’être, Smith’s brand of dark ambient music has always had a ritualistic, even sacred component to it—and not simply because he occasionally included angelic, choral samples in and amidst his cavernous drones and sonic drifts. Listening to those albums was like wandering through a ruined cathedral and catching glimpses and fragments of the holy ceremonies once performed there, ages ago; all in all, a very heady and affecting experience.
Resin
by Ashberry
We live in a society where art, and more specifically, music has increasingly become a commodity. The Internet, music blogs, file-sharing, MySpace—these have certainly made it easier to find, exchange, and promote music like never before. But sometimes, I can’t shake the feeling that by reducing music to ones and zeroes transmitted over the ether and stored in hard drives, we’ve made music even more disposable. We download songs, throw them on our iPods, give them a spin or two, and that’s it.
But there’s nothing physical to ground the music, to attach to it some measure of permanence or to provide even a small check against our increasing rate of consumption, and so it becomes all the more inconsequential: a commodity to be traded, examined, and tossed off with just a few mouse clicks.
In Sea
by Aarktica
For nearly ten years, Jon DeRosa has been producing music with the goal of capturing the sounds that exist inside his head. That may be the goal for all musicians, but in DeRosa’s case, there’s a bit more to it than that. You see, DeRosa is deaf in one ear and as a result, has had to live with aural distortions and hallucinations (not to mention the effects of painkillers)—all of which have served as inspiration for his music.
Originally, his attempts consisted of drone-oriented ambient recordings such as 2000’s No Solace In Sleep. Subsequent albums—e.g., 2003’s Pure Tone Audiometry, 2005’s Bleeding Light—saw DeRosa eschewing his earlier, pure ambient approach for a more structured, song-oriented sound.
Those later recordings contained memorable moments, but I’ve always found Aarktica’s music most affecting and involving when DeRosa is truly immersed in his dronework, however ominous and unsettling it might be. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I like In Sea so much, as Aarktica’s latest finds DeRosa returning to the noisier drones and atmospherics that first typified Aarktica.
Well… almost.
Idylls
by Love Spirals Downwards
I’ve had this CD in my collection for well over a decade now—it represented one of my very first excursions into the “darkwave” world of the venerable Projekt label—but I’ve always held it a little at arm’s length. Though I’ve always liked the CD well enough, I’ve tended to (subconsciously) dismiss it as something of a Cocteau Twins’ rip-off, and instead, became more enamored with the band’s later, more electronica-oriented releases (Flux) and incarnations (Lovespirals).
But blame it on the recent wave of chilly, rainy weather that has swept through Lincoln: after several years, I picked Idylls—the debut CD from the now defunct Love Spirals Downwards—off the shelf and it’s been in near-constant rotation since.
Cartography
by Arve Henriksen
It may be technically correct to label Arve Henriksen a “jazz trumpeter”, but it feels wrong. He does come from a jazz background, and he does play the trumpet. But he plays the trumpet in a manner that, to these ears at least, doesn’t conform to any usual notions of jazz.
Rather, Henriksen’s trumpet playing shows the heavy influence of the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute traditionally used by Buddhist monks as an aid for meditation and known for its breathy, otherworldly tones. Henriksen’s playing is often the model of restraint: he can kick up a whirling dervish of sound but his tone is often much more contemplative and stately, pulsing here and there amidst gasps and wisps of sound that can be surprisingly evocative given their slight structure.
Likewise, calling Cartography, Henriksen’s first album for the venerable ECM label, a “jazz album” may be technically correct, but it, too, feels wrong. As is the case with Henriksen’s playing, the term “jazz” just doesn’t do the music here justice. There may be moments that could fall under “traditional” ideas of jazz, but the album’s sonic palette is broader than that, venturing into the wide expanse of ambient and experimental music. The result is a record that is obtuse at times, loosely structured (if at all), and meandering, but is also very evocative and stirring.
Phoenix Asteroid
by Ecovillage
What’s that, you say? You’re looking for some good bliss-out music, but Jonas Munk (Manual) has become too gritty and earthy for you? Ulrich Schnauss doesn’t venture far enough into the stratosphere? M83’s atmospheres aren’t expansive and shifty-drifty enough for you to really get your bliss on? Well, in that case, may I humbly suggest Ecovillage’s Phoenix Asteroid? With this disc, Swedish duo of Emil Holmström and Peter Wikström have created what could very well be the ambient/dream-pop album of 2009. Surprisingly though, it’s deceptively more than just mere aural wallpaper.
To be sure, there’s quite a bit of song blur going on, in which the drones and drifts of one song just flow right into those of the next song. As a result, the album is little more than a Gaussian blur of shoegazer effects, synthesizer washes, and wispy vocals. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. When you’re looking for pure mood music that contains little too disrupt whatever serenity you’re seeking to attain, well, that describes a good deal of Phoenix Asteroid quite accurately—especially on tracks such as “Dawn Was Brand New”, “Invitation”, and the sixteen-minute title track.