This album is a collection of touching, subjective and introspective ambient hymns where micro-tonal melodies meet occasional experimental elements and softly moving electronic dreaminess.
After a beautifully evocative and impressionistic ambient effort published in 2014 (review here), the Canadian sound designer and electronic artist Phoenix York is back with a new album which mainly consist of remixes from diverse artists, including Aaron Marshall, Arbee, Margaret Harmer, Darren McClure and Zenjungle whose musical specialization easily goes from droning minimal soundscapes, to modern classical and space ambient.
Consequently and despite the content being devoted to remixes, each has been designed in respect to the original track and to the sound aesthetic path followed by the album Godspeed Phuong. This album is a collection of touching, subjective and introspective ambient hymns where micro-tonal melodies meet occasional experimental elements and softly moving electronic dreaminess. Most of the pieces work on timbral textures, sound colors and the perception of micro-tonality inside brief articulated motifs and continuum’s. Interesting to notice the difference of treatment and arrangement operated from one artist to another, especially on the melancholic and gauzy atmospheric theme “Juarez.” John Ove3rblast offers an excellent balance of pulsating kinetic minimal patterns and soothing synth sequences while Arbee delivers a more isolationist, ghostly and bizarre glitch-esque ambient feel to the track, populated by undulating minimal waves and micro punctuations. Margaret Harmer wrote a rather dadaist and dreamy minimal electronic scenery for acoustic chords, electronic patterns and field recordings, surrounded by a rather poetical flavor. The self-titled track by York himself is an efficient, nocturnal meditative ambient soundscape for processed, reversed acoustic waves and mysteriously weeping melodies.
Quiet Mutations is an interesting and imaginative re-interpretation of tracks from the recommended Godspeed Phuong.
Quiet Mutations is available on Buried Standing.
