Elsewhereness revisited is an occasional feature documenting the drift at the margins: ambient gasbagging and blurb blah, ’tube-d, ’cloud-ed ’n’ ’camp-ed up, complete with new companion mix, Elsewhereness revisited #16.
A new age of isolationism is now showing at a living room near you
These times of self-isolation find the world catching up on a concept you may recall from the ’90s and the Ambient 4: Isolationism (Virgin, 1994) compilation including :zoviet*france:, Labradford, Techno Animal, Paul Schütze, Scorn, Aphex Twin, Seefeel, E.A.R., David Toop & Max Eastley, Lull, and Thomas Köner. Clearly an idea whose time has come, a new age of isolationism is now showing at a living room near you. Soundtrack herewith…
The catalogs of Past Inside The Present and its Healing Sound Propagandist affiliate have swollen over 2020’s first quarter. Most recent entry, Slow Dancing Society‘s The Disappearing Collective Vol. I, is billed by Drew Sullivan (SDS) as ‘born from the slow burning affirmation of the things we hold and their dissolving nature as every day gets shorter.’ Nice and serene, but heartstring-tugging from reflection on what’s already lost to the tyranny of time. ‘The Disappearing Collective’ is presumably all who enter here, titles suggest (“What We Knew As Children”), each piece feeling designed to drift off to. (A similar theme gets wider screen treatment on SDS self-release, A Collection of Songs To Vanish With – I.) And a first solo release, [Overtures], from Indianapolis-based Marc Ertel (Dawn Chorus and The Infallible Sea/PILLARS) blends immersive guitar-laden drone works with synth layers in vaporous ‘scapes with a serenity both solemn and rapturous. And Stasis Sounds For Long-Distance Space Travel, sees UK ambienteer, 36, collude with US ‘healing sound propagandist,’ zaké, in a field recording-infused ‘extended hypersleep program’ inspired by nostalgia for an imagined left behind (cities, caves, rain). Spatial transmissions awash with billowing tones for quiet reflection—an act congruent with the tenor of life on this current version of Earth. 36 also offers explicitly designated Music for Isolation; ‘written from the heart, doused in the anxious vibes of the moment,’ nyp ‘to give people something to listen to right now, when it’s needed the most.’
Kévin Séry bounces between his original home on French overseas dept., Reunion Island, a small port town on the east coast of the US, and Europe, picking up inspiration along the way. His first From Overseas album, Home, is a series of oneiric tracts wherein ambient drone cedes to post-rock pluck, melody to noise and back, prompting reflection on the nature of home. Masterful mastering by Stephan Mathieu. Long Formations +4 from fellow axe-scaper, anthéne, features two eponymous pieces from different times that complement, guitar-sourced, ebb-flowing between original layers and variations, manipulated in playback speed and EQ with textures and melodies added. The other pieces are shorter, but feel aligned with the long-form in tone and mood—guitar-led but with strings in “Soft Spoken” and onde magnetique in “Street Lights.” Polar Seas man, anthéne, moonlights on PITP, passing PITP Propagandist, zakè, going the other way for Carolina. Product of a 4-day excursion to secluded spots in Cherokee and Spartanburg counties, with field captures from the quiet hills of Chesnee, solemn woods of Gaffney, and hidden creeks around Spartanburg, Carolina is apt, deriving as it does from ‘song of happiness or joy’ (French), re-enacting moments in the artist’s journey, representing emotions evoked in these areas.
As for HSP, the eponymous label has Hipnotic Earth‘s Rare Quiet Day and Blanket Swimming & DR‘s High Tide in its recent releases. For the latter’s two tracts Jackson MS’s Nicholas Maloney (BS) laid the groundwork for the first, then sent it to Braunschweig, DE’s Dominic Razlaff (DR) for processing and layering, while DR did the initial honors for the second using tape loop composition, sending it over to BS for fairy dusting. The resulting two contemplative tableaux are ‘always present, arriving, yet moving forward and unfolding into limitless depth and openness.’ Coming full circle, from PITP LP to HSP EP, SDS steps up to the Isolationism plate with Failing Light, ‘taking every effort to bring calm and peace in a time of uncertainty, unease, and despair’ with ‘four beautifully solemn arrangements […] specifically created to counteract the fear brought upon today and days to come,’ pausing to add ‘social isolation can be very difficult, but can also be used to channel one’s inner-self,’ which cod-spiritual drivel he seeks to wipe away with ‘these meditative tracks are meant for accompanying self-reflection and discovering inner peace during times such as these.’ Thankfully, saved by the music. (N.B. free—to HSP shirt-buyers, the J-M // 2020 compilation includes Dawn Chorus and the Infallible Sea, Wayne Robert Thomas, Moss Covered Technology, Hipnotic Earth, City of Dawn, and Aaron Ross Hansen).
Tim Diagram has Argentine Diego Masarotti aka Dyb over to Handstitched for Sueños Imperfectos, a reflective peregrination through luminous worlds and into places where darkness and isolation remind of our fragility. He also hosts Somerset-based Ishmael Cormack for Maple Finch, six pieces assembled from field recordings, tape loops and instruments to hymn spring’s coming, integrating real-time playback, multi-layered tape loops and acoustic elements with intricate sound design, lending a warm uncondensed edge. ‘Conceived through multiple thought channels with an approach to nature and the outdoors,’ a familiar theme runs through, aspects of spring—new life, adventure—combined in a vernal meditation via electroacoustic pieces that skirt perturbed, though not disturbing, territory. Quiet, but engaging—the opener light and plaintive, the following “Bending Snow” intensifying via harmonic shifts throughout, and “Looping Finch” with its endless drift full of quiet space. And Cormack’s Ammil is released on KrysaliSound, label head Francis M. Gri accompanying it with a polemic on the lack of purity/integrity in current art/music, where ‘superstructures are ruining our lives,’ and ‘we need to change and enjoy again in the simplicity of little things.’ Initiated as a series of improvised sketches experimenting with use of polyrhythms, then deconstructed and recaptured in a 13th-c. church, Ammil explores how nature’s complex systems create our perception of simplicity and beauty, modelling this by setting up complex rhythms that generate subtle melody.
Yui Onodera’s Moire is based on the Shō, an instrument central to traditional Japanese music since introduction from China in the Nara Period (AD 710-794). Its timbre is as haunting as its appearance; held across the face, the shape is said to resemble a phoenix. Sonically too, it maintains a mythic quality, its reeds resonating to create a deeply affecting sound—doubtless part of what made it integral Gagaku music. This affective quality also drew the Tokyo musician to seek it out and gradually develop an approach to it that merged his interests in cavernous acoustic spaces with the instrument’s sonic potential. This first realization of these inquiries allows both the timbral sensibility of the instrument and Onodera’s unique production approach to co-exist in a loose orbit that extends its hazy dream-like tones, shaping new ambient states echoing outward from the past. Room40, fo’ Shō!
Synergetics/Entropy is two aesthetically complementary early Onodera albums, Synergetics (Drone Records), originally a 2007 release, and Entropy (Critical Path) 2005, remastered and bundled by Dragon’s Eye over a decade on. The former, entirely electric guitar and piano, is a minimal 2-track study in slow motion in which overtones, harmonics, and spectral melodies emerge into expansive drones. Described originally as ‘shimmering like light on water,’ it’s a contemplative experience that at once allows for release of consciousness while drawing focus to a pinpoint of the present. On debut, Entropy, the use of guitar, field recordings and electronics and his manipulation of harmonics and accent noises into simple loops and melodies can now be seen as foundational. Moments of timbral friction add a dimension that gently fractures the hypnotic illusion induced by the warm harmonic drones. Onodera’s deployment of his palette serves to heighten a sense of genuinely active living, the Now foregrounded while the exterior world’s pulse peripherally accompanies.
Keeping close to the edge, contemporary mood music from Shimmering Moods with four gobbets of ambient goodness: Gavin Miller‘s Bradford Telephone Exchange, Tyresta‘s Now Will Never Be Again, Jurko Haltuu‘s Void (songs for guitar), and Sebastian Paul‘s Amongst The Sakura Trees. Miller happens to be UK film-maker Adam Curtis’s music advisor, scoring the heady HyperNormalisation, and traces of his eerie atmospherics can be heard on BTE‘s ‘blend of ambient gloom, warm slabs of bass, and Twin Peaks style guitar.’ Tyresta’s NWNBA ‘depicts a journey into uncertainty and the various emotions experienced along the way,’ via the field recording, found sound, piano, modular synth and Mellotron chops of Chicago-based Nick Turner. For Void, Malmö-based sound artist/owner of Funeral Fog Records, Haltuu, habitual user of guitar with field recordings, synths and vst-plugins, challenged himself to have guitar as the only sound source. Success! And on ATST, Germany’s Paul peddles ‘quality shades of textural gloom and slow motion mood lifters. At times, it’s like layers of well composed gravel being dragged across a massive humming metallic core. Lonesome, trying, yet oddly inviting and satisfying all at once.’ (Lost Tribe Sound, bandcamp)
Neo-cosmic Oaklanders Constellation Tatsu gives voice to its ‘adventurous with spiritual artistic sensibilities’ with its Winter Batch 2020. Among the trio of releases, first up, José Orozco Mora‘s Formas Aparentes, is an organ and synth-driven nugget full of trance-inducing melody and hypnotic repetition that artfully works the interstices between ‘old’ new age, Riley-an minimalism and Berlin-school sequencer sounds. For Samosi (Georgian = ‘cloth’), Tbilisi’s Saphileaum weaves new age, ambient drone, synth and ethno in such a way as to be, Saph says, ‘like a cloth you wear on your journey to the high summits of Caucasus.’ Give us a twirl, Andro! (Gogibedashvili, for Saphileaum is he). And last, Open Spaces—an alias Chris Hancock proposes to use ‘to explore the realms of 360 audio,’ here in the form of Opening Space, apparently written as part of Masters research into audio techniques such as binaural recording and ambisonic spatialisation software. Distinction!
To say Michiru Aoyama has been prolific this year would be somewhat more than understatement. A stream of gauzy pop-ambient has been gushing from his bandcamp site virtually every day since new year. The Kyoto-dweller, with previous on such as Organic Industries, taâlem, and Somehow, now curates his own Bullflat3.8, from which this soupy slew of processed guitar harmonics, glitch and glimmer—’from drone to atmospheric exotica’ (disquiet)—emanates. Lighter than Hakobune‘s nebulous drones, more delicate than Fennesz‘s lyrical glitch-wash, but fanciers of these two should thrill, if not chill, to Aoyama’s lowercase drama.
Jonas Munk offers Minimum Resistance, his most abstract and minimalist album to date. Ten ambient pieces based on guitars processed into soft, slow billows of sound. A rare aesthetic clarity in these pieces allows each sonic component to breathe and resonate, as Munk works with a restrained sonic palette that carries just enough emotive heft to register, hymning as it does slowness, reclusivity and simplicity. No ground broken here, but rarely does ambient guitar flow as effortlessly, with subtle changes and minimal textural details having maximal impact.
Christopher Bissonnette‘s The Wine Dark Sea title is derived from Homer, who was wont to refer to rough and stormy sea with this odd, to us, epithet. All his color denotations were notably devoid of reference to blue, any lexis in his sea descriptions pointing to red, a perceptual misrepresentation that’s brought much speculation as to the significance and understanding of color in ancient Greece. In line with the color theme, track titles allude to contemporary artists and their insights on color, form and connotation. The album sees a shift in Bissonnette’s work, moving from synth-based articulation to an electronic-acoustic hybrid. The outcome is an undulating tonal tide with textures tense at times, though shifting fluently to soft and mollifying passages. Dronarivm hosts.
Santiago’s Infinito Audio Network hosts Plains Apparition for Aperture, a ‘project to externalise feelings of loss and the gradual acceptance of the grieving process’ that deploys similar musical semiotic strategies to 2018’s Watershed EP and last year’s Encrypt on Pure Life. The Chilean label also hosts Illinois’ Ryan Hill aka KAGAMI Smile. Previously on Ambient/Post-vapor labels like Dream Catalogue, BLCR Laboratories, and No Problema Tapes, latest, Passed Over, has the customary heady mix of bleak Ambient, low-beat, and Shoegaze emotionality, with direct influences from Chain Reaction and post-Internet aesthetics. Back to Pure Life, the Mancy imprint also gives a platform to Matthew Heywood aka Bruised Skies (and half of Inchindown with Tim Garratt aka Moon Zero), who ‘creates ambience that captures a hyper-real landscape, oceans of sound lapping against shores’ on Rain No Longer Softens.
A pair of items of ambient interest (or ignorability): ‘Discourses, mutterings, fleeting feelings of a race at the brink of extinction’ from Ybalferran, given voice to hymn Our Last Days by Berlin mysterions, Vaagner/Vaknar. They also host David Lacroix aka Appropriate Savagery, who ‘melts a palette of winterlight tonalities into an out-of-body experience’ on The Same Demons Drawn On A Crumpled Piece Of Paper. New resonance to Vaagnerian.
Now into a sixth decade of activity, Steve Roach ended his fifth with a nyp, STILLPOINT, a gift of gratitude to the faithful for connection to/support of his music. Two long-form immersions accompanied with his usual blend of new age shamanic blather (‘the ebb and flow of this year starting to melt into the next, the reflections of 2019 mix with a calm anticipation of the future, nourished by a sense of serenity in waves emanating from the deep end of the Soundcurrent and beyond’), the music fortunately remaining untarnished. Though Will Long lags behind the Roach man in longevity, his prolificity means Celer-y goodness still abounds. Latest, To an extent; 卡拉OK; L, S, & X, outtakes from sessions for the acclaimed Xièxie, is replete with slow-mo infinite-looping ambient/drone wherein sustained tones swell-relent, surge-recede, in gently mesmeric kinesis. Textures possessed of a spectrality, wispy contrails and transient vapours, sounding sometimes as if captured from a ’40s Hollywood melodrama, are lent an eerie, delicately intense, resonance by heavy effecting and slow-burn endless recursion.
A few quickies: Andrew Tasselmyer‘s Associative Mechanisms, ‘a reflection on the mechanisms and machinery used to process our creativity’ with field recordings from the Gunpowder River in Baltimore County, MD. Slow Day, debut ambient release of Horizon Diver, Swiss producer, Steven Parry, previously a creator of music for film and other genres; glistening ambient with post-rock elements hosted by Stereoscenic. New Warmth via his Archives, Life, sounds closer to his earlier Essay and Home, though with the darker mood of the more recent Parallel and Wildlife. Benoît Pioulard has a single-tracker, partic. reve, on The Ambient Zone of London. Nicely flowing low-key ambient compilations from UK’s neotantra, tʌntrə III and tʌntrə II, incl. Autumna, Milieu, Specta Ciera, Darren McClure, Wil Bolton, Off Land, Nacht Plank, Mick Chillage, Jacob Newman, Sebastian Paul, Tsone, and Yamaoka. Danes, Kalle Christensen and Henrik Laugesen, further their space ambient (too Big to be ‘Ambient’?) project, Lauge, on Latitudes. And oliviaway continues to stream sets of gorgeous ambient micro-symphonies for nothing, or next to it, recent gems being CLOUD LIBRARY, underground flow and HIGHLANDS. Get 170-odd oliviaway releases on bc and save 90%. Tip! If not an alias then a close kindred spirit of oliviaway’s, albeit more retentive, is overscape, ‘an artist who lives everywhere,’ whose character evinces similar long-form drone-ambient and cheap’n’cheerful lowercase sensibilities.
