Since its launch just three years ago, Australia-based Flaming Pines has grown from a small good thing to a truly global and connected hub, profiling a roster of work that perhaps better and more consistently than any other label seamlessly combines synthetic ambience and natural environment.
Sashash Ulz :: A Piece of Water
Sashash Ulz´ A Piece of Water draws inspiration from Petrozavodsk, the unpretty capital of Russian Karelia that fortunately sits nicely perched between two rivers emptying into Lake Onego. Opening grainy as sandpaper, Ulz soon pours oil onto troubled waters in a place blown by cold and pummeled by rain. Temporarily warmed by a spectral choir on “Sleepy Thoughts,” he glides into a deeper meditative state on the eastward-looking “Wordless.” The “Cold Spring Sea” lashing at the legs of a piano warped slightly off-key by the damp puts a proper chill back into the listener. Listen also to his eerie Monochromatic Symphony—like hearing the thin, slow echo of revelry at a medieval count’s keep from down in the cold confines of its cellar dungeon.
Nektarios Manaras :: Hovering
From the Greek island of Chalkis, Nektarios Manaras’ debut solo album Hovering is a jazz-ambient hybrid, sun-drenched and Aegean blue, Homeric and erotic by turns. Taking turns on guitars, flugelhorn, fujara and cymbals, Manaras is joined by a trio of friends in painting a landscape so smooth it strokes the listener. His sensuous flugelhorn on “Sei in a Dive,” “Three Sketches of Meteora” and “Escaping the Orbit” recall Jon Hassell, while “Floating in Anything” whips up a trance circle pounding up the dust beneath its feet before the odyssey is carried over a bridge of sighs onto a cactus-spiked, Western desert plain. Borne upon a rising thermal, the saxophone finally dives headlong into warm ocean waves to lead an “Anemone Dance.” A luscious record.
Tim Bass :: Pastures
At its very centre, Tim Bass’ sophomore release features a track whose title claims that idle thoughts gravitate toward loneliness, but if so, then it is a splendid isolation. Classic, Enovian ambient (comparisons to Eno’s recent Lux are not that much of a stretch), the Melbourne native himself plainly states that his goal was to “develop stable platforms where texture and movement could form their own natural place.” Bass creates an “up-here” that offers a panoramic view of pure, placid being and turns the listener into a figment of his own imagination, before transforming it into a train platform taking us “Onward from Nowhere.” Please listen to his debut album on Twice Removed, too.
All releases are available on Flaming Pines.
