“…a more than promising first outing permeated by a sense of carefully engineered choreographing of atmospheres, and, as such, Savy’s arrangements strike at times as a little too studied – though not over-fussy…”
(November 2010) Audiobulb’s recently inaugurated digital download sublabel, Audiomoves, provides a platform for this very decent debut by London-based sonician Pascal Savy. The Silent Watcher falls in the wake of a surge in ambient drone-basing, a dolefully pastoral musically-inclined specimen, for all that its vales and hills are alive with the sound of non-music; workshop tools, clock devices, rusty bike wheels, children’s voices, the wind in Norfolk, climbing stairs in a disused windmill – these are a few of Savy’s favourite found things, fragments of which spectrally populate his domain of expression, seemingly relating to the fleeting flotsam of memory – scenes un-deleted, dreams re-membered, as it were.
Opening salvoes from Savy are quietly suggestive, both “Distance” and “Contact” proposing a sustained settling density, with chimes of melody obscured by granular clouds and distant aether-borne synth-echoes and the flutters and folds of field infusions; these are rendered so as to retain ghost voices of source identity even as their resonances are abstracted or diffused in a kind of aural halation effect. Things get more involving with “Deconstructing Clues,” which smears tintinnabulating motifs across a drone bed uneasily populated by spectral cries and slow falls inward. Just as a somewhat cloying feeling threatens, as the dip in mellow reverb-doused drones and chimes moves toward something more immersively total, “Asleep” comes; a suddenly techno-inflected affair of clicks and kicks and bass pulse with dark minimal piano jewels studded through dense drapes of Murcof-ian micro-orchestration; it incides nicely through the preceding quietude, its darker-hued beat-driven orientation serving to add depth and variation, and more of this stripe would not hurt (as. the later “Muon” likewise displays). The sombre solitary mood is returned to on “Oblique,” a slow simmering synth-gloop of keyboards and chimes, ripples and cascades in a soft miasma of sounds – an atmospheric world later revisited on the closing “Fading Colours,” which dissolves itself luminously in a velveteen haze of static. Before this the crepuscular “Muon” has waxed and waned, its cycling particulate fluxions, crepitations and muffled hits sounding and resounding to great effect. It’s noticeable in fact how those less cosy-warm spaces with their eerier resonances and liminal machine chatter prove, as with the previous “Asleep,” strangely compelling – more so than the ostensibly more appealing adjacent pieces.
Overall, then, a more than promising first outing permeated by a sense of carefully engineered choreographing of atmospheres, and, as such, Savy’s arrangements strike at times as a little too studied – though not over-fussy; ultimately, though, effective in evoking a state of mildly melancholic reverie. And mastering courtesy of (the increasingly ubiquitous in this role) Taylor Deupree provides added atmospheric heft, unearthing the life behind things within The Silent Watcher.
The Silent Watcher is out now on Audiomoves.
