If you are looking for music which induces deep trance states of euphoria, concentration, heartfelt empathy, and wide-eyed awe at the technical and soul-filled skill of its creators, look no further than AES Dana’s Inks—there’s a huge range of sub-genre styles on display, all of them executed with verve and mastery.
Layered together with a masterful sense of engineering precision
Vincent Villuis has been a prominent, leading voice in the world of ambient music for almost two decades, without ever speaking a word. As both the label head of the storied Ultimae Records label and the prime mover behind the recording/performance moniker AES Dana, he’s laid the groundwork and set the stage for an entire generation of artists and listeners drawn to the “psybient” / “psychill” sound. The terms are terrible, I know, but they’re all we’ve got to describe the ineffable: AES Dana and labelmate stalwarts like Solar Fields, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Miktek, Asura, H.U.V.A. Network (a collab between Villuis and Solar Fields’ Magnus Birgersson), and James Murray all bring their own flavor but there are undeniable thematic threads that runs through the Ultimae catalog.
The fibers that make up these threads are integral to the rich fabric that makes up AES Dana’s latest release Inks, woven into a rich tapestry across its massive 85 minute run-time. What are they? In no particular order: insanely intricate sound design, dub techno, acid house, hard-hitting techno, emotional washes of ambience, all layered together with a masterful sense of engineering precision. It’s a lot.
Normally this is the part of the album review where I break down each track in sequential order, finding some pithy summary to inform the reader of what they’re in for. That task is incredibly difficult with this album for a couple of reasons. First, it covers a massive amount of territory across the eleven tracks—take a single song, “Peace Corrosion,” for example—there’s a slow ambient build up to a driving 4/4 techno thump, then a spaced-out intermission which drops back into mid-2000s Underworld trance, and finally a long lead-out with a burbling acid line underpinning the main beat. To try this kind of summary over each of the eleven tracks would be to diminish the whole. The album is best taken in as an entire corpus: on headphones or over finely tuned loudspeakers, start to finish.
The audiophile element, by the way, is not to be taken lightly—Villuis has always maintained an insanely high standard of production for the Ultimae release, and as time has gone on, he’s gone back to what were previously considered benchmarks of quality and remastered and re-released them with upgraded techniques that are not merely “oxygen robbed copper” level snake-oil. Inks is available on vinyl, CD, and via digital download in both quotidian 16 bit depth and high-grade 24-bit mastering. I listened to the album on first release via Apple Music and was taken aback at its sonic characteristics; but for review I downloaded the 24bit version and the improvement is frankly astonishing. I’m a hardcore only-use-audiophile-in-scare-quotes skeptic, but this album improved on all mediums—headphones, studio monitors, and my primary loudspeakers, with the 24-bit version. It’s made me want to revisit earlier entries in the Ultimae back-catalog, albums I love like Solar Fields groundbreaking 2005 release Leaving Home, to see if they are similarly improved.
In summary, if you are looking for music which induces deep trance states of euphoria, concentration, heartfelt empathy, and wide-eyed awe at the technical and soul-filled skill of its creators, look no further than AES Dana’s Inks—there’s a huge range of sub-genre styles on display, all of them executed with verve and mastery.
Inks is available on Ultimae.
