(May 2010) The stream of ambient drone releases having lately reached virtual flood level, the great and the good and the so-so may seem merged in a blur of indistinction. Adding to this tidal surge, three years on from a highly promising debut EP, comes Hampshire duo Pausal’s debut album, Lapses, on the appealingly quirky Barge label. Rising to the top of the drone tide, Simon Bainton and Alex Smalley do their thing with some kind of alchemy, making of found sounds (field and old vinyl) and instruments (mainly guitar and keyboards) via processing and effects a set of delicate potency.
This reviewer won’t be the first, nor the last, to note the conspicuous echoes of Stars of the Lid’s refined slowcore space drone and holy minimalism (again) here. “One Watery Lens,” for example, is imbued with a church-like tranquillity. And “Lapsing,” adorned by the violin of Svitlana Samoylenko, exudes neo-classical poise without erring on the side of the overpolite. The duo acknowledge the influence, but it’s clear Pausal has developed an individual voice within what has lately grown into a sort of late-period ambient-postclassical crossover tradition. After opening in the fertile fields of “Bottom-up Pause,” “Velmead In Common” fills with billows and swells into a quarter-hour of micro-orchestral ecstasies and reverb-doused piano, outfolding into ever more layers of drones, breakers of delay crashing across the soundfield’s shores. Then ther’s “Without,” which teems with celestial harmonics, infinitely expanding. Field recordings are subtly deployed, and the shorter field-based vignettes – from the roaring cascade of “Bottom Up Pause” to the seagull cries and clanking marina-esque ambiance of “Jetty” – serve to break up the flow of the album’s longer micro-symphonies. As albums go, Lapses is long, but this, added to a lightness of touch, the careful choreographing of gradual build and release, and the layering of treated sounds, all serve to sustain and alleviate.
Let the reader beware: to lump this in the drone bag may lumber it unduly; a piece like “Malnourished Minds” with its shimmering guitar treatments and brushed cellos, or the languors of “One Watery Lens” and “Midshipman,” are not so much encumbered with the portent much out-and-out drone seeks to unload on the listener as bright, if not exactly breezy, expanses endowed with an upward spirit surge. No Enovian elevator hanging at an ambiguous periphery either, but rather an engagement with tonal aperture and the wide light of the upper reaches. The difference between Pausal and the Blessed Brian’s genre-defining work is that Lapses is not only not content to be ignored, but also flaunts the interesting in the listener’s face. Let charges of lightweight droning come from hardcore bashers of La Monte Young and Phill Niblock bibles – those that suspect the beautiful for being merely decorative – a compromise of experimental rigour, and would dismiss any artistry when faced with the gentle cycling of keyboard washes and treated guitars of Pausal’s pleasure. For, far from vitiating, the duo’s shirking of envelope-pushing is a bonus, their work remaining quietly affecting, slowly wooing you with a mix of homespun grandeur and winsomeness that stays shy of cloying. Rather than fixating on the cerebral side of experimental, Lapses goes quietly in quest of articulating the speech of the heart.
Lapses is out now on Barge. [Listen | Purchase]
