These sounds never overwhelm the ambience but, rather, do it service, almost bubbling up through it to add an inflection or humanity to certain sounds.
At Or From A Distance is the third release in Glass Reservoir’s series of commissioned works exploring the interfaces between electronic and acoustic sound. Steiner has risen to the occasion with a luscious and romantic ambient harmony that sprawls across seven low-fi tracks. It is a record that plays a neoclassical attention to the easing of instrumentation—echoing, stringed synths and subdued keys filling the sound with a deep richness and comfort. It is an avowedly optimistic sound that rises and falls gently, giving space to environmental and field recordings—laughter, a radio voice-over, a clicking and whirring of gears. It lends to these things—sounds of cities and societies—a reverence and beauty that on their own they could never claim. These sounds never overwhelm the ambience but, rather, do it service, almost bubbling up through it to add an inflection or humanity to certain sounds. As if the music were an interface between solitude and society—like looking out from a quiet room onto a busy city night.
Each of the tracks gives away a certain strength as well as vulnerability; a feeling compounded by the rising and falling ambience, and in the way that the seven tracks blur and flow into one another. It has some of the sense and experience of Owen Pallett and Arcade Fire’s recent, complex production for the film Her, telling of how majestic and almost timeless the places we inhabit can be. It has a definite sense of sky scrapers and long exposures of busy thoroughfares seen from a distance.
“I seem to glimpse you in every window” draws on the sound of an electronic church organ to draw on that reverence and echoing quality. Similarly, “unsettling” combines a contrast of tighter loops and looser strings which, in unfolding toward the final moments of the final track, provides a wholesome and upbeat curtain to its fadeout. “a comfortable aloofness” gives a complex layering of strings and loops which ring and buzz softly across one another. It is a thoughtful and often more melancholic phase in the record, but one that still shares in the key aural themes that run throughout the seven tracks as a whole.
The swell and romance of these washing, echoing tracks left a strong and lasting impression, a feeling of needing to revisit and rethink them. You want to listen to these tracks burr and turn and repeat. It is night music, the sound of looking out from comfort and quiet onto something immense and full and busy. At Or From A Distance, as a sequence, a full composition, presents a beautiful, honest and ultimately soulful imagination of the feelings of living. Its diverse roots, field recordings, loose strings and echoing loops explore the ways in which sound can be sculpted to convey impressions—of deep thought, of star gazing, of running water, of urbanism and city living.
At Or From A Distance is available on Glass Reservoir.
