The real beauty of a Dave Preston CD is in the way that polished, calm, ambient guitar inventions wrap effortlessly around a folk-rock sensibility that quite often shines through the shimmer. The borderline between his two styles is so narrow, singer/songwriter Matt Morris, with whom Preston has toured, took the tune “Be-Joy” from Preston’s first CD and re-crafted it into a beautiful ballad called “Just Before the Morning.”

The same is likely to happen with one or more tracks from Preston’s latest, Soundtrack for Motion. Melodic pieces like “The Blood in Your Veins” and the heartbreaking “Feeling God Has Left You” (with ethereal violin work by Sam Gathman) seem ready-made to have lyrics just slotted into them–but they also succeed quite nicely on their own, lacking for nothing. Preston can also hang a whispery guitar drone in the air, as he does with “Flashing Emergency Lights,” a nice bit of build/sustain/fade and  “I’m Sorry,” a textured wash like intense but musical static. There’s also a fairly experimental track, “Spinning Away from the Earth,” featuring fellow Denverite Mingo, whose work I also quite like. This one sometime seems like it’s the outsider in the group, falling just shy of fitting in, but after a few listens I grew to like it more.

A pair of highlight tracks drive home the fact that Preston is, first and foremost, a top-notch guitarist. (He has played with, among others, Charlie Sexton, Tab Benoit, Justin Timberlake and Paula Cole.) “A Giant Leap of Faith” is the “big” track on Soundtrack…, with Preston building the thing in increasing layers, a wordless prayer-wail vocal coursing over it. In structure it reminds me of “Be-Alive,” my favorite track from his first disc. And then there’s “Sweet Sound of Escape,” a high-energy piece where Preston flails away at his axe (or axes) while showing what sounds like a bit of influence from U2’s Edge.  This one leaves me breathless.

I said in my review of his first disc, Be, that I was waiting to hear more from Dave Preston. In Soundtrack for Motion he has created a work that was very well worth the wait. It is a Hypnagogue Highly Recommended CD.

Available from CD Baby.

Many dark ambient CDs look to take their listeners by force, launching a grim, grinding gnash of an assault, tearing open a psychic wound and ripping a response straight out of their chest. On his new release, His Master’s Voice, the artist called Phaenon takes a far more insidious approach . After the first few raspy, sharp-edged minutes of the opening track, “His Master’s Voice, Part 1: Neutrino Radiation,” the heavily layered sounds begin to resonate cautiously, the frequency slowly matching the listener’s own, pulling them in until the two achieve a sort of sonic symbiosis that lasts for the rest of the disc. Having established that resonance, Phaenon takes his sounds and digs into and dredges out the darkest corners of the mind, loosening what’s there and holding it up for the listener to see. It’s as effective as any good dark ambient work, but in this listener’s opinion, the difference and the improved listenability is in the approach, the subtlety of sound involved. It elevates the experience by not fully alienating the listener. It’s an isolationist work, but it’s understandably isolationist.

His Master’s Voice is built around hesitantly shifting greyscale drones, thick, solid and weighty. The majority of sounds rise up from the lowest end of the scale, all the better to resonate you with, and Phaenon easily shifts from wall-of-sound density to well-thought-out sparcity.There are only four tracks here, the shortest clocking in at over 12 minutes, so there is plenty of time to cut yourself adrift and just be in Phaenon’s textures and constructs.

Kudos also have to go out to cover artist Eric Lacombe. His dark style, which reminds me a lot of artist/comic book illustrator Dave McKean, fits the tone of this disc perfectly. Disturbing, but imbued with a strange beauty from which you can’t look away.

Available from Malignant Records.

In Phillip Wilkerson’s bio, he mentions that he spent several years experimenting with various types of synthesizers, sound modules, virtual instruments and guitars before he ever starting noodling around with creating ambient music. That diverse and focused experimentation helps to explain the way in which Wilkerson’s sound consistently evolves with each release, retaining elements from the direction of previous works while distinctly turning to a new heading.

Wilkerson’s latest is the very gentle and graceful EP, Interplay. The five tracks here present a thoughtful story told in a near-whisper. The sounds evoke spaces both inner and outer, deep and far. There is nothing here but easy, soothing beauty.

At times it seems that Wilkerson’s main instrument on Interplay is nuance–and he plays it beautifully. You’ll sense it at work in the subtle heartbeat pulse that calmly counts its way through the misty drift of “Markings” and the way a bass-note melody explains itself one unhurried syllable at a time in “Certainty.” In each track Wilkerson’s silken synth constructs veritably float through your head. The overall feeling hovers somewhere between the voyaging drifts of classic spacemusic and a perfect soundtrack for simply watching clouds cross the sky. I invariably find myself putting this disc on repeat play because once through its 50-minute length simply isn’t enough to fully appreciate it.

Lush, calming and beautifully introspective, Interplay is a Hypnagogue Highly Recommended CD.

Find it at Phillip Wilkerson’s web site.

Given the artists’ stated intent to create “…sort of a fake science-fiction movie soundtrack,” it may be unfortunately appropriate that I find myself often fast-forwarding through the low points of Polyphasic’s The Map is Not the Territory to get to the good parts.

The problem, largely, is that the pieces here tend to come off as too mechanical and angular for my tastes, too strictly programmed to be more naturally engaging. The disc has an old, laboratorial sound to it, like early electronic recordings designed to show ordinary folk what synthesizers could do. Let me balance that out by noting that I enjoy (and have recently enjoyed) discs that have an old-school feel to them, but smoothed with a modern edge. Jeffrey Koepper, Moebius and Ministry of Inside Things come quickly to mind. There is a difference to the feel of the thing made new and, when you get down to it, the ponderous thing itself. Several tracks into The Map... I find myself wanting something that feels like someone’s got their hands on the keys.

When Polyphasic go for a more minimal, drone-based approach, the work captures my attention more. The stretch that runs from “8F” through “What I Really Like Is Music” is the best section of the disc. In “8F,” thick, distorted chords pound out an almost military cadence as pads wash over them. Across the course of the piece, the higher points of the sound come down, soften and take on a calmer tone. “What I Really Like…” issues forth as a white-sound wind with hints of texture buried in the flow and develops from there, never striving for more than minimal change–and it works. “Zerzassenquez” has a simliar brain-softening effect.

Listeners more into unvarnished electronic music than I might find more to love here. And since you can download the CD for five bucks at Bandcamp, it’s at least worth your time to check out samples.

Find it here.

I need to begin with an odd analogy. Imagine you’re at a nice party, one of those catered gigs where waiters walk through the crowd with trays of appetizers. You take one as a waiter goes by, and it’s really quite good. In fact, you’d like another. But you can’t find that waiter anywhere, so you opt to reach for another appetizer, and it’s good, too. And that waiter disappears as well. This keeps happening all night. And while the appetizers are nice, you find yourself wondering if there’s going to be an entree at some point in the evening, because you imagine it would be pretty good, given the appetizers.

That’s the sum of my experience with Parts, the new release from D_Rradio.  There are 19 tracks on this very listenable CD. The longest runs 3:28; the shortest whips by in just 29 seconds. The whole of the thing is over in under 40 minutes. It’s a stream of good musical appetizers that, while making me want more, often disappoints in the way they come and go so quickly.

The length, or lack thereof in most cases, would not be an issue if I didn’t like the music. But there’s the problem: I do, for the most part, and several of the better tracks on Parts gather up their sounds and leave just as I’m getting into them. “Better Left Alone,” a melancholic reflection with a feel like slowed-down jazz, is just finding its expressive voice and seems to be approaching a turning point–and then it fades out.  The same goes for the 1:08-long “End of A Wild Life.” It slips in on light strings, sounds like it’s gearing up to have something to say…and then cuts off the conversation, practically in mid-chord, and departs. The super-short tracks, whatever the intent was, become almost ignorable for their brevity.

I get what’s being attempted, thematically. Parts is made of parts and not all parts are complete. But since when they are complete they’re well worth listening to, it makes the seemingly semi-formed ones a bit disappointing. Despite the thematic intent.

There are fully realized, satisfying pieces here. “Midnight on a Moonless Night,” the longest track, sighs and drones its way through a foggy sound-mist. “Ruins of A Wall of Sound” is, even for a short track, a stunning piece of romantically tinged ambient. Warm, lush strings worthy of good chamber music glide in a slow dance around each other. There’s a gorgeous near-sadness to it.

Parts is well worth a listen. D_Rradio show talent and intelligence in every track, no matter how brief. I look forward to more from them.

Available from Distraction Records.

I’ve been meaning to review this disc for several months now, but my computer doesn’t recognize it when I put it in, so it hasn’t made its way onto my iPod, and my car CD player would get a few tracks into it and freak out. And then I, of course, would forget that I have it. Which has been unfortunate, because when I have been able to listen to it, either by swiping my son’s now-unused CD player or remembering to bring it to work, where my Mac is much more accommodating, I’ve been fascinated by it.

Aside from having one of the best titles in recent memory, Jonathan Badger’s Unsung Stories from Lily’s Days as a Solar Astronaut is a challenging but ultimately rewarding disc that slams together an avant-rock mindset equipped with weapons-grade guitar bursts, an intriguing electronic setup and a compositional sensibility that’s largely improvisation-based. Badger has developed a system that augments his live guitar structures with laptop-selected sound samples and loops triggered not just by what he’s playing, but how it’s being played. Mellotron tape loops are also controlled by the guitar’s MIDI output.

It’s easy to overlook the electronic side of things, however, when the first angry, feral guitar chords of “The Vessel Megalo” rip the air wide open in front of you and drums slam out an angry backbeat. At that point it feels almost like it’s going to be a straightforward, hard instrumental CD. That’s one of the draws of Unsung Stories… for me: the way Badger manages to maintain the structural familiarity of that rock feel while crashing it at speed into the forward-thinking subversion of a compositional approach unfettered by convention.

Throughout the disc, Badger uses that subversion to unseat the comfort we take in a melody by twisting and roughening it. It makes us stop listening passively and start looking actively at what’s being done so that we can try to understand. Listen to the way an established rhythm breaks down, regroups and rebuilds over and over in “Beat 1” as fingerboarded guitar squares off against a chipset-like riff that mimics it. Or the way Badger takes the almost-baroque simplicity of a piano and flute duet in “His Face Like Glass to the Touch” and drops in a wayward fuzzy guitar, disjointed snipped vocal samples and a battery of processing and filtering changes, forcing the basic tune to continually work to return to its original state. “Surface” is about the most straight-up track here, boasting a guitar riff that fell out of a Sergio Leone western, but even here Badger runs a serratred electric wire around and through it to try to draw focus away while at the same time requiring the listener to focus more. In each track, while the intent of the thing remains, its appearance is in near-constant flux, bending toward unrecognizability and thus our perception of and understanding of it changes as well.

At time the higher concepts at work in Unsung Stories… can leave me a little cold–or just feeling like I don’t get it. For example, I get lost in the piano tangle in “The Insight That Comes From Repeated Time Dilations” (which, by the way, is a great title) and find myself moving on. But it’s the exception rather than the rule. Badger’s complexity makes me want to listen deeper to more fully take in the experience.

The packaging of this disc is also worth calling out. The inside of the case is strewn with what appear to be random old clippings from books and newspapers. Look at them carefully, though–the text on each pertains in some way to the titular Lily and her days as…well, you get it. It’s an interesting way to add a depth of narrative that goes beyond the music. It serves to invest you a bit more in the concept. Well done.

When you’re ready to think about your music, listen to Unsung Stories from Lily’s Days As A Solar Astronaut. The reward is very much worth the effort.

Available from Jonathan Badger’s web site or MT6 Records.

I would not be the one to best tell you what separates a good dark ambient/isolationist ambient CD from a bad one or what makes a certain CD a “classic” in the sub-genre. It’s never been an area that warrants strong focus from me as a listener.  So I have to take Malignant Records’ word for it when they tell me that Yen Pox’s 1995 cassette recording, Blood Music, is a “benchmark” album in dark ambient.

What I can tell you, however, is that with the CD reissue of Blood Music, I have found myself immersed in, if not engulfed by, the sheer density and depth of this music. I’d go so far as to say that in focused listens for this review, there are times when I’ve gotten absolutely lost. The sounds here range from thick and heavy to sparse and, for lack of a better word, patient–the patience of waiting for something to occur. Something most likely unfortunate. A gripping darkness obviously rolls through everything here, and it’s appropriately relentless.  Shifts in urgency act almost like beats, taking hold of your attention as the tension changes, pulling you closer, daring you to stare, fully conscious, into this wailing abyss of sound. Then it lets you go, lets you fall back, your head full of what you’ve seen there. And it’s not pretty.

I don’t know what Yen Pox have been doing in the 15 years since they created Blood Music (my Google searches haven’t turned up much), but I would be interested to hear what they would be capable of creating with updated technology at their disposal. That’s my takeaway from listening to Blood Music–it’s dark ambient that makes me actually want to hear more of it.

Available from Malignant Records.

Talk about an appropriate title. The half hour or so it takes to listen to the most recent release from Carl Sagan’s Ghost, Colonial Spa, is likely to be one of the most laid-back and soothing stretches of time you’ll spend. This is space-lounge cool at its finest, a gravity-free mind-massage while beat-pulse engines ease you into orbit around a planet made of 100 percent chill. And, of course, someone hands you a complimentary and suitably spacey cocktail in the middle of it all.

Well-meant metaphor aside, Colonial Spa is, for a relatively short offering, a real pleasure to get lost in. Daniel Davis pulls together his several downtempo grooves, folds in subtle hints of dub, smooths it all out with soft washes and airy pads and carefully places effectively infectious rhythms, all without a bump or harsh edge to be found. Everything moves with the grace of Davis’ conceptual “low-orbiting satellite spacestation where beings from around the galaxy gather to relax, trade, and converse” spinning quietly in space. He smartly leads many of the tracks here with sounds that have a round, soft feel: the muted vibraphone-like tones that bounce around “Meccahnomad” and the pizzicato-esque backdrop and repeating three-note phrase in “A Place to Kill Some Time” are solid examples. Crisp microtonal sounds flecked throughout the mix add texture and secondary percussive elements, and Davis’ own attention to the depth of his sounds brings a richness to the already soothing character of his tracks.

I know that I’ll be booking more–and more frequent–flights to Colonial Spa. It’s a relaxing place and you can’t beat the view, especially from the spinward side. Join me there sometime. First icy Jovian cocktail’s on me. Colonial Spa is a Hypnagogue Highly Recommended CD.

Available from the Carl Sagan’s Ghost web site.