The duo known as Cyberchump has always had a certain chameleon-like sense of identity. They’ve dabbled in IDM with thick beats, they’ve quieted things down to a meditative flow, they’ve strapped on guitars to revel in their prog-rock roots. After years of inventive reinvention, Jim Skeel and Mark G.E. had a chance to let someone else figure out who Cyberchump is, so they naturally took it. They handed tracks from their first two albums over to “laptop tweaker” Janzyk, and the result is ReGrooved, a club-friendly, funk-laden joyride that neatly (and wisely) retains at its core the smart synth-and-guitar blend that is signature Cyberchump.

The source albums came before my initial introduction to Cyberchump (2004’s Scientists in the Trees) so I can’t cogently comment on what Janzyk did re: the originals. What I can say is that it’s an early Saturday morning as I write this review and three tracks in it’s all I can do not to get up and start dancing around the kitchen. This is potent stuff, beat-wise, and packed with lots of extra ear candy that make it a pleasure to drop into. Highlights for me include the smoky, sort of John Klemmer-ish sax that writhes through the bass-thick “Space is the Case,” and the punchy dancefloor attack of “Love Offering.” By contrast, Janzyk slows things down with “Dreams Groove,” a sparse track that rides largely on a cool backbeat and occasional chordbursts of guitar. This one takes its time, doesn’t cram in any excess sound, and comes off as one of the slickest tracks here. ReGrooved is a disc that really shines in a shuffle, pulling an immediate energy into any flow. It’s just plain fun to listen to, track after track, and quite nicely put together. In outsourcing their latest incarnation, the lads of Cyberchump chose wisely.

Available from the Cyberchump web site.

Like much of ambient music, there is a filmic quality to Pascal Savy’s new release, The Silent Watcher. But rather than presenting a panoramic view of some sonic landscape, Savy works in extreme, intimate close-up, pulling tight focus to capture the intricate workings of things. Gears turn and interlock with stop-motion precision. Ice crystals climb the length of a blade of grass. An insect’s leg moves on sand. All of it rendered in exquisite slow motion, the ordinary turned alien, a moment pulled toward the horizon and held there.

Savy’s abstract concepts stem from sounds he’s captured from a variety of sources. The ticking of clocks, a rusty bike wheel spinning, field recordings…each bent, filtered and manipulated before being tucked with careful finesse into droning backdrops. There is also an air of sadness throughout, the recollections of things cast off, our attempts to recapture moments reduced by time and distance to imperfect memories. And yet, for all that melancholy, The Silent Watcher is never overly heavy or imposing. Savy manages to make it oddly soothing while maintaining both the emotional feel and the sonic intricacy.

Allow yourself to be guided through Savy’s musings on The Silent Watcher. It’s a trip you’ll be taking more than once. The Silent Watcher is a Hypnagogue Highly Recommended CD.

Available from AudioMoves.

Sun Sea Sky Productions is a relatively new label, about 40 releases old, that has been churning out a stream of interesting, well-made IDM-style CDs with a sometimes softer, more thoughtful edge. Among these are Boy Is Fiction, whose excellent Broadcasts in Colour I reviewed on the old site in June, and these two releases, Boc Scadet’s Temporary Oceans and Northcape’s Captured from Static. Based on these three releases, Sun Sea Sky has become a label that I’ll be watching and awaiting releases from.

There are similarities of style between Captured from Static and Temporary Oceans. They’re both packed with richly melodic tracks built around looping beats, doses of glitch and soundswipes, all infused with an air of downtempo calm. In fact, I put them both into a single playlist and hit shuffle, just to see if I could tell one from the other. I did pretty well, and what became clear in comparison, working through those touches of sameness, was this:

Northcape’s Captured from Static is, by and large, the silkier of the two. It’s an expensive blue cocktail of music, a little exotic in spots, perfectly mixed and served cool, infused with a flavor that makes you just have to say “Nice” every now and again. Alastair Brown builds his tunes with the deft touch of a good bartender (to keep the metaphor–ahem–flowing), adding the right elements at the right times to constantly improve a piece as it moves forward. The electronic edges here are softly rounded and sensuous. It feels at times like the sounds here have been carefully muted or sanded down for a better sense of calm. It all goes along with ease. And if the opening track, “Doesn’t Feel Like A Long Way” isn’t an immediate enough hook into Northcape’s sound for you (and it should be), then by the time you reach the elegant, eloquent and downright sexy beat-and-flow of “Grove Park,” the deal should pretty much be sealed. Brown takes a smoky lounge piece, rides the tempo up and down and gives it a little extra bite with some raspy electronics for texture. Brown shows his excellent sonic/impressionistic skills with “Shinkansen to Kyoto.” I had to Google “shinkansen” to see if the image in my head was correct–and it was. A sense of motion, a landscape moving by quickly, an intermittent metallic rhythm…I think you’ll get it, too. It’s well done. “First Day in a New Town” brings an infectious, radio-ready beat and a little extra sugar in the mix. There’s a lot to like on Captured… and there’s enough differentiation, track-to-track, to avoid the feeling of repetition that can plague this style.

If we keep the bar/refreshment analogy going to compare these discs, Boc Scadet’s Temporary Oceans is the funky drink the bartender whips up and hands to you on the house saying, “I just thought of this. Try it!” You do, and it’s good, but it’s definitely sharper and tangier than that blue drink–and you know you’ll immediately have another of the same. Lawrence Grover culls found sounds to mix in with retro-tinged synth melodies, and exhibits a steady hand at adding depth and interest to his tracks. His constructs are somewhat more angular and mechnically precise than Brown’s, but certainly no less intriguing. I like Grover’s blend of styles here and the way he moves from one track to the next. For example, going from the laid-back zero-G float of “Sentry” to the uptempo pleasure of my favorite piece, “Seaem,” with its cool-walking bassline, rich, easy melody and a drum loop that puts me in mind of a Deepfried Toguma track. The closer, “Lumen,” is the musical version of slowly dimming the lights to close the place down, with one last look over your shoulder. A synth like a softly played concertina lends a wistful folkiness to it. Deep listening pays off on Temporary Oceans; Grover excels in adding little touches that catch and delight your ear. It’s a pleasure to wander through it to find out what he’s going to do next. After just a few tracks you know that whatever it is, it’s going to be interesting.

Both of these Sun Sea Sky discs have been in strong rotation at the Home o’Hypnagogue since they arrived, as has the disc from labelmate Boy Is Fiction, and I imagine all will likely stay there. So far it seems I can’t get enough of any of them. I look forward to more new music from all of them, as well as from Sun Sea Sky.

Juta Takahashi’s seventh release, Hymn, is a quiet offering of three long-form drifts in a classic ambient/spacemusic style.These tracks are built on familiar, sighing synth pads that rise, twist around each other intimately for a few moments, then part ways to grab hold of a new sigh lifting itself into view. In this manner the listener is taken aside, mentally massaged to calmness and left to float. While the layers here never seem to run particularly deep, they are always handled with grace and a good sense of timing. Nothing feels like it lags too long, nor do Takahashi’s expressions leave too quickly. There is an enjoyable balance at work. Hymn is, I feel, a better low-volume CD than something that you need to get deeply into. The strength here is the quietness, not the complexity. Treated as a classically defined ambient album and left to sonically augment a space rather than impose itself on it, Hymn simply glimmers .Add this one to your favorite spacemusic playlist and enjoy the ride.

Available at CD Baby

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Hello! I’m glad you found your way here from the old netfirms site. I’m excited about this change of format, and I hope you are, too.

I started Hypnagogue in late 2003. A good friend, John Harvey, designed the old site for me in Dreamweaver and I’ve been writing into that template ever since. But the web moves fast, and the changes and improvements over the last seven years have been remarkable. And there I was, slogging along in a very Web 1.0, labor-intensive environment, sighing heavily every time I had to move all the reviews from page A to page B, archive the stuff on page C, etc. etc. etc. Plus, I felt bad for the musicians who had posted a link to their review, only to have it disappear from view after 30 days.

The answer to all these woes, potentially? Moving to a web 2.0-style, automatically archiving, update-as-ya-please blog. I think this will help to reduce my backlog and keep new reviews flowing. I’ll also be looking into posting clips to better represent the music and bring a richer experience to you, the reader looking to discover new music.

So I’ve jumped into the 21st century at last. Glad you’re along for the ride.

peace & power,

John

aka The ‘Gogue

All art stems from a deeply personal space, and the output takes its form based largely on where we are emotionally as well as artistically at the time we create. When we’re happy we write love songs or paint in bright colors; when we’re sad, the songs get morose and packed with minor chords and the paintings get darker and more brooding. So when a work originates from a point of taking a long, introspective look at who the artist is, where he’s come from and how he views life in general, the result is going to be loaded with varied emotions and shifting forms of expression. This is the nexus point of of Steve Roach’s newest offering, Sigh of Ages.

Crafted during what Roach describes as extended periods of solitude and personal reflection, Sigh of Ages understandably looks back over Roach’s shoulder and is unapologetically nostalgic in spots, from the frequent familiarity of tone and structure to the use of older equipment, including a 40-year-old Arp String Ensemble. At the same time, however, Sigh has the freshness of imposing the craft of the artist of now on the artist of then to alchemize the two periods into a unique flow. “The View from Here” is such a track, where the sequencer-driven Steve, who first tapped and twiddled knobs in the 80s and then returned to his analog synths 20 years later, works crisply across the top of a mellow drift brought in by the Structures From Silence-era Steve by way of virtually all of his endless deep-looping excursions since. The same construct, with a somewhat different vibe, courses through the loping semi-mechanical groove of “Return of the Majestic.”

There are also passages here that are as outrightly melodic as Roach has allowed himself to be in quite a while. “Morning of Ages” is an outpouring of emotion that borders on a wordless confessional. It packs feelings of remorse, longing and possibility–or perhaps what you hear in it is what you bring to it. But you will hear it.

While it may sound entirely too posturingly metaphysical to say so, Sigh of Ages imparts a feeling of bare-souled honesty in every track, and this is what, in part, makes it such a stunningly gorgeous CD. It is Roach telling you that this is who he was, and is, and wanted to be, and hopes still to be, all in one go. From a listening standpoint it’s deep and surrounding, warm and, in spots, pleasantly energetic. This is a disc you will be listening to over and over, just to feel it again.

Kudos also go to Chuck van Zyl for his content-perfect cover photography.

Sigh of Ages is a Hypnagogue Highly Recommended CD.

Available from Projekt and at steveroach.com.