As other artists have done recently, Dan Pound reaches into his musical closet and blows the dust off 22 tracks from five earlier albums recorded between 2004 and 2006. Remixed and remastered, the pieces on this two-disc retrospective run from guttural tribal ambient to classically soft ambient flows to rhythmic New Age. Pound arranges the pieces to take the listener in and out of these various zones with a sense of narrative. It also imparts, for the new Pound listener, an understanding of the breadth of talent at work here. The first disc sets itself up as tribally themed early on, and sticks with it for much of the disc. Three tracks from the Other Worlds CD kick it off with some spot-on work, with clacking stick percussion, hollow-cave atmospheres and deep chants. The title track from Other Worlds takes it uptempo with cool sequenced beat and snaky, echoing curls of didgeridoo. Three tracks from Return follow; here the tribal feel shifts to more of a world/ethnic flavor, picking up Middle Eastern spice. It’s an interesting way to keep the listen in this sort of electro-shamanic space but to distinguish movement within the journey. The shifting in style continues until we find ourselves in the graceful New Age piano of “Elemental Traces,” the light and airy melody washing off the sandy dust of our prior excursions. Tracks from Door Beyond Time come next, exhibiting a well-balanced blend of spacious ambient and more rich tribal/shamanic vibes. “Thunder Voices” resonates with the feel of potent medicine; big drums and tribal singing fill the space. Pound opens a dark space and ushers us through it in “Beneath This World,” a slow-moving and extremely atmospheric piece that’s eerily lit, its shadows thickly populated with uncertainty. The didgeridoo work here is perfect for the worrisome place Pound is describing. Disc one closes out in fairly dark territory courtesy two ominous tracks from Return. “Last Wave” grinds along on growing percussion and weighty low-end drones, managing to get deeper and murkier as it goes. A great end to the first part.
At the outset, disc two would appear to chart a similar course; the Heart’s Core and Horizon tracks that kick it off have a nice shamanic feel. The drums in “Finding My Way” carve out a hypnotizing rhythm over lush, calming drones. Pound’s voice eases in above the sound–this is a great flow that’s loaded with emotion. Pound bends the flow toward rhythmic electronica with “Horizon’s Edge.” This piece has a very familiar feel that I just can’t put a name to. (The tribal stuff rings with Pound’s influence from Steve Roach, speaking of which.) The second half of this track, the title track from Door Beyond Time, has a wide, cinematic sense that puts me in mind of Jeff Grienke’s later work, or much of the stuff released on Spotted Peccary. It’s got a distinct voice, and it’s talking about some broad, lovely vista. Pound takes the percussion and stuffs it into the distance, which is a great treatment. It’s there, but it takes on a windy, indistinct feel that lets the quieter tones glimmer. The joyful “Way to Ecstasy” is another world-style piece fueled by uptempo drumming and a high, flute-like melody. Infectiously pleasant! This segues neatly into a stretch of quieter pieces, beginning with the easy downtempo flow of “Heart Into Soul.” This is best described as just a laid-back and beautiful instrumental. Touches of guitar come through, singing in a high, sighing voice, and an unhurried beat keeps time. “Warmth Inside” blends piano with long synth pads in a piece that straddles the line between ambient and New Age. “Last Waltz” is another piece with a familiar sound, a fairly simple and understated, burbling melody that’s absolutely enchanting. “Arrival” from Door Beyond Time closes the set with lush flute over rich pads, a warm and introspective sound.
This review is longer than I prefer to write in most cases, but there is so much going on over the course of Return to Other Worlds, so many tracks that absolutely hit the target and hit it hard, that it’s not easy to avoid wanting to say something about most of them. The tribal stuff is as smoky and serpentine as Roach’s best; the New Age work is vivid and filled with story; and every track is loaded with depth. This is an excellent primer on Pound’s work, and really just a sampling of his prodigious output. But if this two-disc set doesn’t make you a Pound fan, nothing will. A superb release, and a must-listen.
Available from Dan Pound’s web site.
When Finnish ambient artist Janne Hanhisuanto promises you both Light and Shadow, rest assured that you will get excellent examples of both, in nicely balanced measure. In this eight-part disc, Hanhisuanto offers an always-engaging path that travels from classically spacey, “choirs of angels” ambient down through misty, murky spaces and ends with a genuinely breathtakingly beautiful piece that lands squarely in the middle. Most of the work here is pulled together in standard ambient structures–there are big, cloud-like pads that ease across the frame in their own good time, those breathy vocal sounds, twinkles of synthesizer starlight. But they’re handled well enough to not feel stagnantly typical. At the outset, a sense of easy relaxation takes hold, and it’s a pleasure just to fall into the sound. I quite like that when the shift in tone comes, it’s not a new track; rather, Hanhisuanto takes the fairly bold stroke of changing the quality of light mid-stream in one track. Right as you’ve settled in to this peaceful flow, it gets different. The darker side of the voyage is built on layers of minor chords and long bass notes that anchor the bottom. At the end of Part 5, Hanhisuanto raises the intensity with a rising, sharp wash of sound that deposits us in a calmer space (Part 6) where light clatters of percussion tint the backdrop. There’s a sense of discovery to this piece, of having come through something and taking a short respite. Part 7 continues the upward sense, though it passes through moments of uncertainty. Hanhisuanto closes Light and Shadow by bringing in a melody that courses over the return of the soft vocal pads. The earthy touch of the singular notes contrasts nicely with the intangible aspects of the drifts through which we’ve passed. There’s a reverence and a sense of hopeful relief that rises upward and delivers a real feeling of closure to the journey. I’ve enjoyed Hanhisuanto’s last few CDs since he first came to my attention, but Light and Shadow has secured its place as my favorite. Great at low volume, superb on a close listen, and ideal for long, looped listens. You must hear Light and Shadow.
Omphalos, the new release from Peter DiPhillips starts off drawing the listener in with workable quiet-music/spacemusic intentions, but comes apart a bit toward the end with his three-part “Tranquillamente” suite. The opener, “Witchifalls Ta,” does a decent job of laying down a somber, pensive air, chords pulsing and wavering against touches of dissonance. It establishes that DiPhillips is capable of creating emotional content. He ups the ante over the next two tracks, “Nica” and “Along the Mohawk Trail.” This is the strongest stretch on the disc. “Nica” forms itself into a down-tempo floater of a piece, laced through with spacey flavors and a laid-back beat. Cool washes stream past as DiPhillips plays with layers–adding, subtracting–allwith a well-guided hand. “Along the Mohawk Trail” goes darker than the rest of the work here, an amorphous gathering of sounds tied together in spots with tribal-tinged percussion. There’s a full journey here, and DiPhillips glides easily through its stages. The percussion comes and goes at the right time; the deepest parts of it fill with moving shadow, a little cave-exploration foreboding. (Things get very interesting, and a little hypnotic, some time around the 7-minute mark.) Throughout, the synth washes are thick and loaded with atmosphere. A very good ride. “Monk’s Bella Vue” twists its component sounds into a tight drone with neatly understated hints of sacred music. And then we get to the “Tranquillamente” pieces. I feel like they suffer from coming after such strong pieces because they feel less polished. The hesitant (on purpose, one assumes) structuring of the first piece and the relatively thin layering of sound comes off as a sort of amateurish noodling on a synth. The apparent lack of confidence and the sense of waiting for the piece to become something more wears quickly. The second part somewhat sheds that sense, but the pairing of bouncing chime tones over long chords can feel sort of wayward. The third piece works to salvage the suite; it’s more of a lulling ambient work with DiPhillips modulating the sound. Problem is, by this point my attention has been more or less lost. On top of this, although I am neither audiophile nor sound engineer, the sound on Omphalos seems muddy at times–and I’ve listened to it straight from CD as well as in an mp3 format.
I think you can only say to yourself, “What the hell?” so many times in a single listen before you have to accept that you’re just not digging it. Such is the case with the plunderphonic pile of oddness that is Lost Weight’s Immune to Jewels. There are interesting spots, but not many, in this collection of work dating from 1995 to 2011. “Thing King” takes a couple of elements, one of which sounds like one note on harmonica, throws in a clangy power chord, adds a scream, then ramps up the amplitude and stretches the whole thing into a thick, barbed-wire-coated drone that fades just before you completely feel like murdering it. “Opposite of Occam’s Razor” is the best thing here, which may not be saying much, as it pulls Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” into sound-morsels and re-arranges them. It almost becomes an a cappella hymnal in spots. Beyond that it’s a series of mid-air collisions between sources and odd pairings of existing pieces that quickly becomes a series of punches to your brain. The whole plunderphonic idea seems to have fallen by the wayside in recent years, and a listen to Immune to Jewels would suggest maybe that’s a good thing. If you like noise, experimental approaches, and wildly non-linear composition, have a listen.
Nothing remains in shadow for long. It’s the nature of shadow. It’s not darkness, it’s variances of shifting light, a constant movement of states. And so it is with Shadow District, the first collaboration between Chapman stick/8-string guitar artist Har and ambient craftsman Altus. Between the title and the ominous, clattering start of the first track, it would be easy to quickly dismiss this as a dark–or reasonably dark–ambient release. But that’s barely scratching the surface. Yes, “Descent to Street Level” is moody and grim, with death-march drums (actually Har banging on his Chapman stick, then processing the sound), a plodding rhythm, and occasional wails that sound like they were recorded in a sewer tunnel. But then the light changes and a rather unexpected piano takes the forefront for “Abandoned Playground” and the tone becomes a sort of nostalgic, almost tear-jerking melancholy. This is a slow ballad played out in musical imagery, our mental camera pulling inexorably back and away as the tune works its way to its last sad note and thicker clouds coat the sky for “Borough of Shadows.” This, along with its followup, “Victims of a System,” dwells well within ambient territory, spooled out in slow-motion churns of pads and tones. “Borough…” is the darker of the two, a bit on the claustropobic side. “Victims…” eases off slightly, its scope widening and lightening, the pads feeling broader and brighter but still wrapped in a quietly pensive fog. Working through another shift, Har’s guitar takes center stage for “Burning While They Watched” and carries into “Along the Shattered Waterfront.” Again, the pairing of tracks come in a sort of dark-to-light variance; “…Waterfront” works its way down to a quiet, drone-like drift as Har gently tosses a repeating phrase into the darkening air. The closer, “Betrayal at Twilight” bring us back around to a somewhat more worrisome space. The tones feel sharper, the narrative more tenuous, the atmosphere far less certain. And then in the middle of it comes Har’s echoing guitar work, like a gleam of post-rock light briefly splitting the clouds.
Let me put it to you this way: I was in the middle of another round of listening to Andrew Lahiff’s Inner Worlds Returning, and during the first track, almost like an involuntary reflex, I reached over to my speakers and turned it up. Later, I did it again. Because in the middle of this set of lush ambient flows I was stricken with the idea that I wanted to feel even more enveloped in the sound. I needed more of it, stat. This doesn’t happen often. Lahiff’s new release is loaded with big, layered ambient drifts backed with atmospheric sounds; this is the musical equivalent of laying in a wide open field at midnight and taking in the full arc of stars, the night sounds around you, and a sense of deep-reaching calm. Lahiff manages to give his music a broad scope while keeping the feel incredibly intimate. The sensations that the music pulls up are uniquely yours, but this is the sound of a vaster thing, a communal spiritual point. And, yes, this review borders on hyperbole, but there’s the effect. From the vast feeling and vistas evoked in the moving “Almost Dawn in the Valley” to hushed and meditative flow of “Echoes of the Harmonic Canyons,” this disc reaches down and finds something personal to stir, something very much you to awaken, and at the same time expresses something tribal, binding, bonding, to turn it into a shared experience. Lahiff keeps his pieces warm, touched with light tribal percussion in places that plays neatly off the various natural sounds lurking under the music. It’s a masterfully restrained blend; Lahiff can create a bit of narrative tension with a subtle change in tone, and relieve it just as simply, all without so much as rippling the sound-pool. This is a superb low-volume loop, the silken sounds melding effortlessly into the backdrop. It also, as I said, takes on a robust vitality when turned up. Headphone listening reaps superb awards. My only comment outside of praise is that some tracks cut off a bit roughly; I almost wish this had been worked into a seamless flow. This, however, is minor. Fact is, Inner Worlds Returning has been getting a lot of repeat play at Hypnagogue; I expect that will be the case for many listeners. If you haven’t discovered Andrew Lahiff yet, let me suggest you don’t know what you’ve been missing. Start here, then go deeper. There’s a lot to enjoy from this prolific artist.
Sound sculptor Joe Frawley turns his attentions to the story of Sleeping Beauty on his new release, A Hundred Years. Presented as a series of non-linear visions of the tale, the disc wanders its way through such diverse waypoints as a French opera from the early 1800s, a Japanese novella from the 1960s, and Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s long poem, “Jenny.” In Frawley’s fashion, even within their own moments these pieces are chopped, splayed, peppered with aural buckshot and rendered down into jump-cut dream-moments that may or may not actually exist. One of Frawley’s devices that I truly enjoy is his tendency to take a vocal snippet–of which there are many here–and cut it off at a point where a point feels like it’s about to be made. Between this and blowing up simple moments like a drawn breath or a single consonant in a way that imbues them with an almost uncomfortably voyeuristic sense of catching someone in an intimate moment, a great majority of the impact of the music here comes from the voices. Whispers, recitations, moments…all worked around a melancholic and, if you’ll pardon the pun, sleepy piano line. This piano is another Frawley signature; it has a wonderfully old sound, bordering on frail at points, that draws the ear. The composer suggests that A Hundred Years should be played on shuffle to allow the listener to create their own unique “mix” of the storyline. This is also an excellent way to genuinely listen to what Frawley is doing in the work because it allows you to come at it from different perspectives each time. Multiple straightforward listens would breed a familiarity that might have you missing elements–which would be a shame, considering how much is packed into each moment.
On the Bandcamp page for his new release, Steve Swartz calls Respire “a work that is delicate, intimate and, at times, visceral in nature.” I would agree, and to that add “frequently challenging.” The central idea is interesting. Swartz recorded himself and friends breathing in a quiet room. The sounds were then taken and processed and manipulated, always retaining the rise-and-fall rhythm of breath. Other instruments were added, and they too were played with that inhale/exhale motif in mind. The result is something of a mixed bag. When the idea works, it works magnificently. The second track, “Yours Mine Ours” is the textbook illustration. A bassline drone, sighing vocal samples and a sound like a harmonium (I assume it’s a guitar) rise and fall at different rates. In the back, lonely, plinking notes on a piano dot the flow. This is a warm and deep piece, comforting in its simplicity. The closer, “Breathe Out the Sea,” also balances the elements neatly, the breath sounds standing in for the hush of ocean waves as subtle drone-work pools around it. In spots, unfortunately, the breathing comes off sounding a little too much like someone’s on a respirator, a thick, Vader-esque hiss. For me, it’s distracting. And I feel it’s a problem that this is what makes up the majority of the opening track, “Butterfly Flaps Its Wings.” The endless rush of white sound is bound to be a barrier to listeners less in tune with very experimental concepts, or who simply lack musical patience. The tracks here are fairly long, with four out of five over ten minutes, so it can sometimes feel like a barrage. I like what Swatrz does in “Ocean Breath (313 Version),” with a percussive pulse and gritty guitar chords swimming against a strong undertow of noise, but its companion, “Ocean Breath,” is one of those breathing-machine pieces that tests the endurance. Respire is about 50/50 for me on the long tracks. I appreciate Swartz’s idea; I’ve just had trouble coming along for the full ride. Definitely worth checking out, moreso if you lean toward the experimental side.
I have said it before: I am a Phillip Wilkerson fan. So when I get a disc wherein Mr. Wilkerson has once again given himself over to long ambient drifts, I content myself in knowing that I will be spending a good deal of time looping the work. And so it is with Highlands, a suite of three longform pieces (the shortest about 16 minutes) and one notably shorter (9 minutes) track that are in no hurry to go anywhere. This is classic relaxation music, carved out of far-reaching, soft synth pads, cloud-like and warm. Although the disc is parceled out in four tracks, it’s very easy to get so gently entwined in the flow that it really becomes one simple, soothing, hour-long meditation. (And, yes, this disc is perfect for that.) Wilkerson’s expressive drifts maintain an overarching feel of quiet hope. Wilkerson’s compositional voice only raises in “The Mirror of God,” where he hangs everything on a large, bold chunk of drone. Even here the optimistic feel prevails, the drone coursing in a higher register, an ethereal voice sustaining a brilliant note. Around it Wilkerson floats smaller bits of sound, like dust motes shining lazily in sunlight. Highlands is a superb low-volume listen, one of those discs that affects the atmosphere into which it’s introduced. Looping is mandatory, and headphones reveal a splendid depth. Wilkerson is in full control of his craft, and Highlands is one of his best drift-based works to date.
With a nod to “the spacier side of the Cocteau Twins,” Beth Brown and Jason Sloan launch into a set of “low-fi ambient” pieces under the moniker Amalaise. The Twinning Pools is a carefully curated stew of field recordings, processed vocals, murky ambient excursions and a somber, veiled atmosphere. What stands out about this release is the movement it makes from noise-oriented sound experiments to a less edgy, almost relaxing framework. Early on, the sound is muddy and a bit gloom-stricken, the thickness of the duo’s low-fidelity intentions rendering it a little bass-heavy; distorted voices and an industrial pallor dominate. The second track, “Like A Barn Dead Horse,” sloughs in with dragging feet, the sound quickly molded into a pulse that throbs under somber but lightweight chords. A chant-like vocal sample floats in and at this point comes the recognition that we’ve been lead into very interesting sonic territory and we need to pay attention–attention that is immediately reward by the jerky stitch-work of “Body Ladder.” Repeating vocal snippets, the churn of machinery, dense clatters of pure noise, and under it all a vague sense of cohesive rhythm keeping it from bursting at the seams. This is as deep into experiment territory as Amalaise choose to go, and it’s a definite barrier to casual listening. It’s work, and it’s worth it. At this stage, however, the tide turns. Beginning with the liquid gurgles of “Piscine,” The Twinning Pools softens up a touch and glides over toward the ambient side of the room. Even the muted voices of “What the Living Do” are accompanied by warm dronework. By the time you’re deep into the 10-minute-long title track, the work takes on a sort of mellowed post-rock glow without losing its freaky/funky sound pedigree. The percussion at the beginning lays down a sort of urban-tribal groove over sighing vocal pads and big synth washes. The motion from near-chaos to near-order throughout The Twinning Pools makes perfect and pleasant sense. There is a total journey going on here.
Hypnagogue Music Reviews 