With only a handful of releases under its belt so far, Nantes-based Soft is shaping up to be a new preferred haven for the discerning ambienteer.
Arash Akbari :: Cracked Echoes
Like Porya Hatami and Tegh, Arash Akbari joins a slowly growing cadre of class Iranian ambient artists reaching Western ears. Whereas Hatami’s ambient is a little dirtier, a lot closer to the ground, Cracked Echoes is of a hugeness. Akbari’s layers of digital synths and looped guitars wash over the city, settle the street dust and cascade down the steps. The first two tracks are a bit retrogressive, in the good sense; like hearing classic Vidna Obmana for the first time. “Tomorrow’s Daylight,” the album’s seventeen-and-a-half minute epic, tampers more with the atmosphere, examining the air and how sound travels through it, and what the air might pick up as it curls and eddies. Here is a kind of grittier “field noir,” albeit one that bows out with grace.
Kissy Suzuki :: Proposte Monochrome
Even a James Bond know-nothing like me recognizes Kissy Suzuki as the name of a Bond girl, and the James Bond wiki reveals that she is the only one of his love interests to have borne him a child. Perhaps that’s why David Teboul, head of Soft and sound artist known as Linear Bells (more below) chose her as an alter ego – sexy but nurturing. Proposte Monochrome was composed in tribute to French painter Yves Klein, remembered for his astonishing monochrome paintings, especially those blue ones, bluer even than the very blue insides of this handsome, six-panelled digipak. Rather than “dark,” the forty-one minute title track is afterglow ambient. It wells up out of a sense of well-being. Run-on grooves sound like the embers of a fire burning down. Ever changing, never changing. Glorious enough in splendid isolation, Teboul adds two quarter-hour pieces, “Blue Chamber” and “White Chamber,” respectively, which serve as wings of the triptych or post-gallery thoughts on wings still soaring after having been immersed in such blue. Majestic and magical.
Linear Bells :: The Stars Will Shine
Soft is also generous. Linear Bells, Teboul’s central musical endeavor, is a full double set clocking in at 147 minutes plus a bonus EP offered to early-bird orderers featuring the twenty-one minute “Robots, Orchestra and Tones.” All tracks were written, performed, arranged and produced by Teboul, except for “Too Young to Die,” co-written with the above-mentioned Porya Hatami.
This stellar release is mostly cell-ular, by which neologism I mean dominated by dragging cello bows, creating a desolate but not entirely inhospitable setting for some high-sky streaking and tentative piano. Teboul imagines himself cliffside, moving precipitously along the coast, as his sweetly looped strings roll and crest. He moves ever so slowly. He subtly folds in field recordings, coats the surface with vinyl crackle and leans on the organ, revelling in long, sustained tones. As these tones suggest grand horizons, the echo of others gives the impression of limitless heights. The bigger the picture he paints, the more the listener is drawn in and made to feel. A dampened, five-note piano trill builds a nest in your subconscious through repetition and contrast with the rough surface. The two final tracks, “Wide Open” and “Grey Point,” serve as a slightly sad, slightly dubbed denouement.
While the first disc is a thematic whole, Teboul invites us to consider the second a quartet of freestanding cinemascapes. As such, some may appeal more to others. The audience at my inner multiplex was fired up by “The King and the Frog” with its hollow, Budd-inflected piano brilliantly treated in the thin air, and the gorgeously paced twenty-five minute “Too Young to Die.” The expansive, color drift open landscape we´ve come to expect of Hatami is reshaped by a dry wind that also carries the meanderings of a piano into earshot, its notes cocooning and emerging as butterfly synth bubbles.
All releases are available on Soft.
