Experimental Electronic Music
Masaya Ozaki explores various sound sources on Mizukara and then manipulates them into comforting or sometimes discomforting new textures. There’s various acoustic instruments that get played with, contributing to the album’s overall variety and different soundscapes.
While their core ideas are always there, minimal variations make these pieces work, as they’re not just loops going on for 25 minutes straight; there’s so few minimal details that it’s worth pointing them out individually instead of providing examples.
Even if the album as a whole isn’t trying to make all of these different styles work together, RamonPang seems to be able to achieve something interesting with all of them, as despite some harsh contrasts in the tracklist, all the tracks eventually manage to pull me in and make me accustomed to their new sound.
This combination of hammering pulses, screeching feedback and tight grooves creates a captivating sound that doesn’t work solely because of its intensity, but also because Brandon Invergo shakes things up effectively throughout this release.
The fifteen vignettes that these pieces offer are rather similar in atmosphere throughout disc 1, but a significant shift happens once you reach the unnerving nature of the second disc; though the first isn’t easy either, it does leave a lot more room for relaxing and somewhat reassuring natural sounds…
It feels almost odd to say that this is Adam Wiltzie’s solo debut album; Wiltzie has been working in various groups for over thirty years, groups with which he’s amassed a pretty large catalog, but one that was lacking his very own solo creation.
A soundtrack in which its single moments are most definitely enjoyable and work as such, portraying a good variety of different imaginary scenarios that are apt to the album’s concept.
This is an overall consistent and fun LP, one that does not rely on any quirks to be appealing; what Old Haunts can really rely on are its intense grooves, so much so that they’re both the backbone and in the forefront of these tracks.
