The first new releases of 2016 from Shimmering Moods—by Parallelism and Valanx—continue to champion the cause of artists blurring the boundaries of ambient, drone, electro-acoustic and sound design.
Sage Taylor may be familiar to ambienteers from various beatless and beat-driven projects (Textural Being, aspect., Moxil & Taxil), most recently Parallelism, whose Untitled was a keynote release from SM‘s early 2015 inception. Angular Geometry continues in similar vein–all woozy pads and swells with bristling environmental captures, though there’s more to it than heads-down mindless mood shimmer. Synth-driven ambient drone with muffled field recordings, sure, but, caveat reductor, no mere random kerplunk and fizz and drifty dream pads here. Setting out with liminal tones and murky tape hiss, an ambiguous yet weighty caché of harmonic resonance and subtly riven rhythms is slowly infused in a fluid realm of pulsing ‘scapes; a broth of electro-acoustic goodness simmers beneath grainy stretching of tones over airy chords for deep divers for a certain affective freight beneath the waves and transient micro-beats in Angular Geometry‘s teeming natural settings.
Veteran Glasgow-based producer Arne Weinberg‘s Valanx has been quietly active lately with a series of 3″s (Copper, Gold, Silver, Bronze) for his diametric. label. The Towering Pillars full-length for SM makes plenty more noise, though not of the loud kind, as claustrophobic rhythms in errant time signatures are interpolated with a doleful creep of gruzzy drones seeping through its interstices. Weinberg pokes into brackish post-industrial run-off zones with a darker tone than many fellow ambient drone crones, wresting forth cavernous sound sculptures whose tenor strikes as somewhat out of keeping with the in-house style–less shimmering than shuddering and quaking thrown into the mood mix in a sometime dirty, stifling and atonal sound stage alive with bio-mechanical heaves and strains. Dense and downcast, with a certain corroded poise about it, something somehow soothing comes out of The Towering Pillars‘ hermetic archaeologies.
Angular Geometry and The Towering Pillars are available from Shimmering Moods, Norman Records, Stashed Goods, Databloem, and Experimedia.
