During my initial listens to Geosynchron, the new release from Access to Arasaka, I began to get the impression that what I experiencing was something like a glitch “concept” album. You remember concept albums, right? Big, proggy things usually spread over two discs, telling a story through music and lyrics? Well, cut it down to one disc, drop 99% of the lyrics and what you’re left with is the underlying story, told in sound. Imagine my surprise when I wandered over to the Tympanik Audio site and read this: “In the final chapter of his quasi-trilogy, Access To Arasaka’s Geosynchron offers a full conclusion to what began earlier this year with the Orbitus and Aleph EPs.” Although I haven’t heard either of the previous chapters, I still found myself caught up in AtA’s dark narrative. Geosynchron shouldn’t be confused with your standard glitch disc, one that’s focused simply on high-RPM beats and flashy edits. This is about using noise to create atmosphere. The beats and the masterful glitchwork are still there, but they exist in service to something larger, which makes it stand out. “Iixion” finds the artist swirling together chaotic mashes of sound, a jagged beat pulsing uncertainly through the tangle. Listen to “Naos,” where the two sides of the working equation combine fantastically. Grinding and crunching stretches of noise fight over a slowly metered-out melody like a crawling pan across a darkened cityscape, interrupted by flashes of static. And then into this mix comes Jamie Blacker’s opiated, mournful vocals in “Lysithea.” A sense of black surrender runs through this track, dirge-like passages punctuating Blacker asking, “Are you ready to be alone?” (My ears also pick up a very slight echo from “Welcome to the Machine” at times.) Geosynchron stands out from typical glitch discs for the potent mass of emotion at work. This is a smart disc, not in an IDM way, but structurally and tonally. AtA knows what he’d doing, he knows how his story ends, and he delivers it in pure feel. There’s not a lot of this type of music I can sit through–Geosynchron is a superb exception, standing out in a field marked by commonality.
Available from Tympanik Audio.
Time passes slowly. Jack Hertz’s four long, minimalist, drone-based pieces are not at all interested in hurrying along, and that’s fine. Hertz’s hypnotic flows are built on wavering layers of sound in a classic ambient style, moments pulled out to thinness then released to fade. His lines wrap and weave their way around one another before quietly unfolding to go their own way. There’s a lot of warmth to his tones, and the long-f0rm structure of each piece–the shortest is over 13 minutes and the longest almost hits the half-hour mark–makes it easy to just get lost in, both as a whole and in the individual pieces. Time gains its allure by adhering to the Eno-dictated function of ambient music; it can be listened to deeply (there’s certainly enough going on to make it worthwhile) or it can be passively taken in as it seeps osmotically from the speakers and fills the space. It raises its voice above a whisper only infrequently, and only where it matters or makes sense–in the last track, “Yesterday,” for example, where Hertz hunkers down for a bit more concerted knob-twisting and waveform-manipulating. Even here, though, he maintains an easy-rolling backdrop. The spell is never broken once Time begins. It may actually be a little too passive for some; but having looped it for literally more than six hours in a sitting without considering that maybe I’d like to listen to something else, I think it’s exactly as passive as it needs to be.
On his second outing, Synthesist presents 10 tracks that switch between calm spacemusic and New Age-tinged synth songs. On the spacier side, composer Christopher Pearre hits all the genre-right memes. His flows are calm filled with with layers of stellar-twinkle electronics. The title track nails it spot on, from the deep drifts to the rain stick accents. The must-listen track here is “Tibetan Bells,” a meditative wash of sound that rolls in like a subtle tide. About midway through the track, Pearre weaves in a low-volume bass that tracks like an understated beat. Wisely, he keeps it down there, leaving you to wonder if it might morph into something else–but no, it’s just there, as present as a pulse. Great track. There are spots on Light, however, that stray a little far into a formulaic, new-Age-lite sound. “Air Wave” and “Ascension” are the culprits here, but it may only be that the better pieces surrounding them make their heavier hand stand out. “Air Wave” made me feel like I was patiently waiting for the next available representative. And the thing is, Pearre can straddle the line between beatless constructs and more traditional melodic structures. It’s there on the excellent track, “Pareidolia.” Here, he keeps his melody half-submerged in a catchy sequencer line and threads a little tension through the air. It’s laid back yet really rich in feeling. “Morning Light” also finds itself in this kind of space, gingerly skirting the New Age edge. It swells with romance in spots, but never overflows or gets sappy. This, I think, is Pearre’s sweet spot and when he hits it, it’s very much a pleasure to listen to. While this disc runs about 60/40 for me, its strong suit is that every track is filled with passion and feeling. Well worth checking out.
I freely confess that when it comes to glitch-based discs, I all too often find myself in the “didn’t I just hear this?’ mode as yet another track snaps, crackles and pops past on its way to being less than memorable. I gladly advise you that I never entered this mode while listening to …At the End of It All from C.Db.Sn. Chase Dobson infuses his textbook glitchwork with strong melodic elements, cinematic vistas and laid-back tonal elements. All the flurry and flutter of glitch is there, pinned down in spots with the coarsely ground bass of a dubstep influence, but Dobson can also cut loose and soar unfettered by the traditional elements. The break in “Airport (Never Land)” is smooth and relaxing as Dobson drops the heavy electronics in favor of an echo-rich piano melody. The title track cruises with top-down-convertible cool on lounge-worthy vibraphone tones. There’s a quick drop where most might throw in a frenzy of glitch and a truckload of bass, but Dobson just ups the vibes and sets a course for more ahhh. I could listen to this track all day. It’s a piece that I distinctly feel as it moves along. “A Silent Sea” carries a backdrop that feels like a cross between an old-school sequencer line and an electronic version of The Edge’s “firestorm guitar.” Dobson melts a big chunk of drama into the quite-dubsteppy “Seven Days Warning.” This tracks stalks you, taking slow and menacing steps, a constant wub-wub heartbeat throbbing in your ears. Great atmosphere. …At the End of It All is one of the rare glitch-based discs that stays in my personal rotation. It’s smart–and smart enough to know when to lay off the standard-issue stuff. Great work from C.Db.Sn.
Joe Evans’ Runningonair label is in the middle of churning out some very interesting and often challenging releases that, while they may not be easily accessible, have a deep (and often mathematical) back-story to them. There’s something about knowing that back-story that has helped me find entry into discs that might otherwise fall outside my comfortable listening parameters. (See my review of Guy Birkin’s Symmetry-Breaking.) This leads us to Return Written Arrange by Daniel WJ Mackenize. While I hate to resort to cutting and pasting PR material as part of a review, I think you need to follow along with this: “The core of Return Written Arrange uses input from a variety of musicians who were asked to provide sound recordings of their choice from a selection of musical pitches and durations of Mackenzie’s own design. These were arranged in the order of when they were sent back and the resulting sequence was duplicated in a way that corresponded with the Fibonacci sequence, subjected to minimal production and compositional enhancements and left as semi-aleatoric pieces, as much constructed by chance and choice as they are bound by the rigidity of the sequence.” Still with us? Okay. This concept accounts for two of the six tracks on this 40-minute outing. The first is the shorter of the two, but Mackenize maximized the effect of his equation quickly. You can hear the elements layer themselves in, rapidly building to create a strange, slightly unnerving atmosphere. A woman’s voice recites a repeating list of words in a halting cadence, just echoed enough to give it an otherwordly feel. The components range from staticky crackles to high chimes. The whole thing feels like the soundtrack for a performance art piece. The visuals will undoubtedly create themselves in your head. The second installment is the longer/longest on the disc, taking up 16 of the overall 40 minutes. It begins like a dirge, somber tones in yawning chords, smaller elements glistening at the edges. It feels less “chancy” than the first part, and benefits from its structured tone. This one, too, rises to an impressive density of sound, a dark monolith carved in compelling tones. It has a very pensive feel, less unnerving than the first but no less deep, emotionally. Arranged around these two pieces are shorter, piano-based improvisations and experiments where the keys wrestle for space with barbed electronics. These pieces have a more frenetic feel, as if they’re trying to say as much as possible in the short time they’re allotted.
Lush with sacred music overtones and lightly wound with shadow, Alio Die’s new release, Deconsecrated and Pure, establishes a sense of meditative reverence from its first notes to create an extremely intimate ambient space. A hymnal quality takes over from the start in “Layers of Faith.” Woodwind sounds take the lead here as Alio Die (aka Stefano Musso) builds his way toward a wonderful sonic density. Light touches of field recordings help Musso carve out a sacred grove for the listener, a very personal cloister for hushed reflection. The second track, “Obliterated Alcove,” gets a lift from vocal samples. Musso takes recordings of work by 16th century Venetian Renaissance composer Claudio Merulo, performed by Paolo Tognon and the Quoniam Ensemble di Dulciane and De Labyrintho Ensemble Della Rinascenza, and layers them over his droning loops. His arrangement, apparently giving each voice in this choir its own personal phrase, makes each feel like a piece of a quite larger whole, the segments falling apart and coming together in a rich, fragmented prayer. Near the six-minute mark, Musso pulls back the drones and lets the voices take the forefront. This is where the disc elevates to its strongest sense of the sacred, riding on that largely unprocessed presence. Again, as the field recording of a stream (or rain? hard to say) is subtly dovetailed into the mix, the atmosphere of the piece is again heightened. With “Peel Away This Mortal Coil,” Musso introduces a clattering bit of dissonance into the mix, playing with the contrast of metallic collisions, twists of key-searching woodwinds and his base drones. It’s a busy track, but the chaos is obviously controlled. Nothing overwhelms; there’s a tenuous chemistry happening between elements, and the dissonance just skirts the edge of feeling too random. What makes this work even more is that it flows into the softer space of “Cerulean Flow.” This is my favorite stretch of the disc, ten minutes spent wrapped in concentric coils of sound. There is a warmth to the voice here that may be amplified just a bit from its coming on the heels of “…Mortal Coil.”–but it’s a very personal warmth, regardless. Musso closes the disc with “De-Altared,” again giving over to threads that initially compete and jar one another. The woodwinds honk rather than sing; wayward field sounds poke out of the sound; the mass feels like it’s trying to find its identity–but again, within the tangle a calming sense of near-order surfaces. There are so many intricate layers at work, it’s a pleasure to get lost in the interplay. This is the longest track on the disc, and Musso carefully plays with the balance of sound and emotion, wildness and reserve.
In under 40 minutes, Winnipeg-based artist Stephen manages to lay out ambient music pieces inspired by, among other things, films by Lars Von Trier, internal conversations, lost children and dead raccoons. The 10 pieces here are quick hits, most roughly pop-song length, so there’s not a whole lot of room for development. And, as you might guess from the range of themes, it’s something of a mixed bag. Experimental pieces like “The Conversation” and “Tron’s Wooden Leg” go somewhat awry and seem like they’re trying too hard to be interesting. On the upside, when Stephen is content to slow down and spread out a little, there’s good listening. “Cycle of Life” is built on a slow, melancholic melody over which he lays subtle, almost ghostly field recordings. The result comes off like a patient panning shot across his thematic timeline. (This one’s “visual” involves a woman dying of cancer at 18.) “Lost in Frequency” pulls off a good balancing act between skewed and straightforward. It opens on the soft side and drifts along, eventually taking on a beat and some textural treatment. The sound-play skirts the edge well; it doesn’t go too far and disrupt the symbiosis that develops. Stephen is at his best in the ambient framework of “Floating in Space.” He nails the theme here, long pads supporting a stretched melody. There’s a good turn here, a switch in tone that’s nicely executed and takes the story to a different and no less interesting place. Abstract is hampered, I think, by its own shortness. I can’t shake the sense that it could be a stronger, more fleshed out effort. Thirty-five minutes overall isn’t much time, musically speaking, for most artists to say much, especially in this genre, nor is the three-to-five-minute per-piece range that Stephen shackles himself to in his work. The vocabulary is there. Of that I have no doubt. But I’m not sure Abstract is the best expression of what Stephen may have to say.
In a genre that tends to be dominated by the “record today, release tomorrow” mindset begat of and enabled by the influx of DIY technology and software, the duo Austere distinguish themselves with a work ethic that involves composition time followed by shelf time, agonizingly self-critical consideration, and a refusal to release music just for the sake of being heard. This translates to a good thing, as their releases carry the quality that comes with a surplus of patience and control. Their latest, Euterpe, revels in its deeply layered sounds, quietly anchored by what the duo say is a “centuries-old Tibetan meditation ‘pulse.'” The blend of near-drone tones and the heart-slowing effect of the pulse make Euterpe a disc to fall directly into. First, however, you’ll need to pass through the slightly darkened gate of “Polyhymnia.” This piece features vocals from Christina Carter that, while lending a sort of mythic/spectral feel, are also just keening and edgy enough to make you work to take in the beauty. The depth of sound here gives it a sensation of sitting in a temple, listening to these wordless prayers echo off the roof, the sounds redoubling on themselves to discover new depth. From there, though, the duo settle down to carve out constructs that they self-deprecatingly (and with a bit of a Wink) call “ambient mindscapes that even your Mom will like.” Well, I’ll tell you what–I must be your mom because I like the coming-sunrise washes of “Roseate” and the way it quietly builds while keeping an optimistic tone. I could happily just curl up into the warm, hypnotic sound-cocoon of “Sunshone” and stay there as its base drone keeps wrapping itself around me, textural touches easing past like wayward thoughts. And I love the ode-to-the-muse flute work from R. Johnson and Glurp on “Betroven,” paired against another whispering and unwavering drone. The thing about Austere is that even if they decide to do “accessible” ambient–and let me say here that I’ve never found them all that inaccessible–they’ll do so (and have done so, here) with their signature depth. They will tweak it to make it specifically theirs. Euterpe is not a disc of simple ambient music; it’s deeper than that and requires you to have a real listen. Spend 17 minutes inside of “Totonality” and you’ll get it–there are sounds upon sounds, including guitar work from Freq.Magnet, and the interplay between everything is mindfully made and deliciously complex. Euterpe needs and rewards attentive and/or headphone listening. As with any Austere disc, the wait was decidedly worth it.
The duo Mitoma piece together speedy glitch constructs and IDM grooves on their new release, Satellite Hive. You get what you expect here. The beats are thick and hard-hitting. The glitch-work fires at synaptic-overload speed. Repetitive elements lend it bit of a hypnotic feel in spots. (Check “Residual,” for example.) Throw in a bit of a dark edge and the occasional lean toward the more industrial side of the scale, and that’s Satellite Hive. High point for me here is “Rawling 4851,” which comes off like the theme to a science fiction show if it was done by Prodigy. Your pulse rate cranks up, your body takes up the beat, it’s fun. For me as a listener, however, Satellite Hive is pretty much Yet Another Glitch Disc. If you can’t get enough of the stuff, give it a listen. (You may want to move quickly, however; the run is limited to 100 copies.)
Not all of Janne Hanhisuanto’s Quiet Places are entirely quiet. They are all, however, quite engaging. With a flair for variety, Hanhisuanto presents 11 distinct narratives that range from spacemusic-style meditations to perky, sequencer-based riffs to clean New Age simplicity. The disc starts off in space with “Hayley.” The piece shifts when Hanhisuanto subtly slips a bit of hand percussion in under his starlight synths to ground it. “Ptolemaios” takes a short piece of phrasing and works it through a slowly rising feeling of drama. Hanhisuanto finds his focal point in a potent bass note that cycles through, growing in presence and importance as the piece proceeds. The song feels like it moves through scenes, with its center shifting from element to element–from a slight Mediterranean flair to the bass, to patient runs of glittering notes. An excellent offering. The artist briefly gives in to the dark side with “Breathing Universe”; opening with cold-space tones and minimal movement, the piece comes across like you’re watching stars from a distance. Their shimmer is there, far off, something to reach for that never quite comes. I like the way Hanhisuanto maintains that feel of vastness and separation without getting too grim. Often, an artist truly shows us what they can do not by how much they can put into a piece, but by how little they require. Hanhisuanto does this with “Daydreams” and “Romance(2).” In amidst all his electro-wanderings, he comes back down on these tracks to let the purer sound of guitar and piano, respectively, gleam through. “Daydreams” matches a folksy acoustic guitar with a pleasant electric piano accompaniment and lets them simply sing together. “Romance (2)” is a straight-up, one man/one piano situation, a composer caught in the midst of, well, a romantic moment. The clean sound stands out on the disc without ever feeling out of place; it’s merely a step in the overall journey.
Hypnagogue Music Reviews 