(02.17.08) Kompakt’s annual Pop Ambient compilations have by now become a seasonal tradition for discerning ambienteers, this being the eighth since 2001’s inaugural edition. And 2008’s Köln micro-concert, like festive treats such as Christmas pudding or brandy butter, constitutes another rich and indulgent selection of sonic sweetmeats. Seasonal parallels extend further, the outside-chill vs. inside-warm reflecting December-January’s Northern-exposed external setting for this internal kuhl-warm float-fest. If you’ve heard past PAs, you’ll know more or less what to expect. But that doesn’t imply being underwhelmed, more comforted in the knowledge that Kompakt’s collectively assembled blur-drift drone-pillow will bear you up, providing a headspace balance of lush and languorous lull with discreet diversion. The envelopes of pop or ambient remain largely unmolested by unseemly pushing, but Kompakt’s guiding ethos, as applied to the Pop Ambient concept, has never been one of experiment, more a kind of popular
classicism applied to an essentially ‘outsider’ musical genre. It has rather been, like the genre it represents, an affair of slow almost imperceptible development, both in overall and individual constituents’ sound.
Markus Guentner, the only PA ever-present, exemplifies the quiet evolution through the years, bookending the assemblage with less distended offerings than his customary windswept expanses. Opener “Oceans Day” picks up on ambient’s adoption of guitar strum’n’pluck, folding ricocheting chords and trills into trembling synth-strings deepening into drone. Wolfgang Voigt (you can call him All) ambiguously bids us “Sag Alles Ab” (“call everything off”), with an infra-hip disc-skip trip, the sound of silver darkly glistening with reverb-trails and offbeat percussive glitch-ticks (though, frankly, a less toothsome tweak of a recipe from his Gas cookbook he’s been presenting as “Alltag” – in variously numbered versions – since 2001). So far more drone than space, so it’s good to find Jorg Burger – in his non-Modernist guise of Triola – in excellent textural voice with a more variegated soundfield; his “In Lourdes” expertly offsets aqueous atmospheres with more pronounced incursions from rolling and rippling waves and plucks and gentle cymballine strokes, falling somewhere between Biosphere, gamelan, and (soft) furniture music. After which Andrew Thomas’s crystalline “Shiny Garden,” though illumined with shafts of iridescent light preserved from his Fearsome Jewel, is little more than high class filler. Then maverick Thomas Fehlmann gatecrashes the horizontally-inclined party with “Camilla,” starting life as an ambient dub-loony tune run through with queasy synth-tones and a virtual chime orgy, before settling into techno-driven lounge whimsy. Its mood is notably at odds with its surroundings, breaking the hypno-flow with a downtempo shake-up.
Faltering, uncertain in tone, at this point, the collection crucially recovers its poise from this slight derailment with a wholly successful three-move gambit that’s so soaked in feeling it transcends its ambient remit. Ulf Lohmann’s “My Pazifik,” a masterful vignette of motion and stasis, suspends an almost-Reichian arpeggio of guitar-harmonic in a reverberant wash that stews sweetly in its vaporous juices. Popnoname’s gorgeous “Fembria” is replete with all the grandiose string swells of a Mahler symphony, thick with keening lump-in-throat emotionality. Sandwiched between is Klimek, perhaps the most improved artist of the PA roster, his
“The Ice Storm” signalling a ditching of the more enervating aspects of his staccato guitar glitch-stutterings for a more satisfyingly smooth foray into quasi-classicism; its filmic resonance seems to tap into a rich vein mined by erstwhile kindred spirit Marsen Jules (absent from this collection after an appearance on PA 2007). DJ Koze gives “Nymphe und Schaefer” a gently swelling two-chord twirl – little more than a fragment – before The New Fuehrer of Fragments, The Field, gives another trot-out for his one-trick post-trance pop-tech pony; his “Kappsta 2” comes on like he was a Next Generation Kapitän Voigt emptying out all the gloom’n’gauze of Wagnerian Drang-sturms for a loop-library refresh of sad-happy Shieldsian Dream-pops. Those opting for CD format will find the bonus of Ulf Lohmann allowed out to shine once again with a crepuscular “Kristall,” a lovely limpid languish in reverb-moistened exhalations, delay-haloes shimmering around its washed-out micro-symphonics. And the man Markus too returning to make this an hour of aural bewitchment for the bothered with his “Sparks”, whose quietly chiming grandeur orchestrates a final flowering in Pop Ambient 2008‘s rapture of petals.
Pop Ambient 2008 is out now on Kompakt. [Purchase
