Neonate Shimmering Moods label’s rapid-fire release strategy tops our pile with an array of the unknown, Gallery Six, Michiru Aoyama, ~~^^^macheteoxidado^^^~~, TimeDog, and away from the unknown, Benjamin Finger and Bengalfuel. See how the Moods shimmer.
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Hiroshima Hidekazu spools out gossamer texture and watery sound findings into Gasansui. As Gallery Six, his exhibits are smarter than the average, rendered at least as interesting as ignorable, bird chirp and foliage rustle drizzled and folded into pillowy billows. A low-light dynamic emerges, a gestural entity rising from the water into the air, then re-submerging—sometimes with tone color etiolated and form evaporative, at others motioning more toward the winsome and the lush. A study in delicate detail and mellifluous flow, cultivated and found sound offset each other. “Haven” is the most serene and tactile of pieces, as is “Hatsuyuki,” chiming and cascading with sundry nature tones, and “An Imaginary Friend” almost unfeasibly vanishes in its own vapors; “Compass Rose” languishes in sonic fatigue, as if of SotL vintage it had drunk. Overall, Gasansui suggests itself as an imaginative choice to soundtrack relaxation and healing practices, or, if your boat isn’t so floated, a ticket to armchair travels.
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Kyoto’s Michiru Aoyama studied electronic music in Berlin (kudos), and ‘the result of that journey’ (refresh metaphor, please), we’re told, ‘led him to ambient music’ (note to electronic musicians with no fixed destination: Berlin journeys currently dirt cheap with Easyjet). Readers may be aware of his Organic Industries previous (see here), which exhibits the benefits (‘the sound begins to shine‘) of total immersion in environmental sound. From its outset, with “To You, Relax,” In a Dream leads the listener into a wonder/wander-land where quotidian ambience is subsumed to the will-to-zone out. Aoyama proves a capable out-zone engineer, choreographing sparse synth strata into a drone-drowse adorned with field float and flutter into a chronically pacific paean to horizontality.
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The artist known as ~~^^^macheteoxidado^^^~~, laden enough with a bonkers moniker, is further saddled with some ripe sub-fantasy tripe blurbed over Viento de las Montañas. We start with ‘harmonica sounds trapped at the bottom of a well,’ which ‘leads to a tunnel,’ where ‘the sound of something distant thrashing echoes toward you;’ and ‘This place is unknown, but not hostile. Curiosity is the word.’ If you can stomach it, we go on to ‘the lobby of a labyrinth,’ whence ‘you are called by a cloaked receptionist and led through a door,’ to ‘a catwalk suspended over an abyss,’ where ‘a soft purple glow comes up from the endless altitude of this cavern,’ with ‘a cloaked guide at the edge, looking over the grey-green hills,” who ‘will sing in a language you do not know, but there is greater meaning in what he sings than in the songs of your home.’ All this, presumably, to illustrate that the album is ‘deeply narrative’ (though note: ‘only with repeat listens can you explore this world, and you will notice new glows, murky pools, whistling wells.’) Muttering darkly about ambient as affordance for self-directed narrative, not secondhand storyboard, your Resident Ambient Advisor exits, but not before pointing that the music, with its metallic swathes, edgier than average anodyne, found sounds and industrial timbral tinges, holds its own on its own.
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TimeDog, alas, is a fellow-sufferer, The Fragile Present being trailed with clunky attempts to construct meaning and credentials. Try ‘improvisation and long live takes are critical for his sound as a means to translate aspects of the human condition as directly as possible,’ and ‘the variation and diversity in themes and styles found throughout this album is a direct result of this compositional process.’ This tosh is plonky enough without gear talk of ‘a variety of hardware analogue and digital synthesizers’ with ‘guitars, piano and a multitude of percussion instruments’ (not 1, not 10, not 57 varieties—no, a multitude!), and ‘field recordings woven into some pieces’—no DAT detritus desultorily dropped—no it’s woven; oh, the artisanship of ‘multi-instrumentalist and experimental composer,’ Pete Burton. We then suffer the ‘epic ambient excursion’ of “The Pilgrimage,” and “Fear of Change” with its ‘chaotic percussion’ and ‘haunting piano’ (n.b. for piano, haunting is the mandatory epithet). These are not just promo trappings; to say it’s All About The Music™ ignores the wider creative context and related discourse of a work. Case rested, this is a document of the fragility of our Being in the Now, with TimeDog on a quest for a World Beyond (he’s from Glasgow). Lulled into a false sense of synthy security, the listener has the fluffy rug pulled out with proceedings turning several shades darker by “Ancient Tales,” gathering dissonance with low droning cello-like bowed guitar. Many a twist and turn along the way, as on “Fear of Change,” hosting an abstract cluster of sudden percussion, thin but crushing strings, and horror soundtrack bells, subsiding into treated field recordings. Don’t shoot the piano player.
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On to Motion Reverse, where we’re gratifyingly removed from directorial heavy hand, invited instead to engage with a heretofore forever moving Finger (Benjamin) in a less restless more reflective mood. Processing a recent period of creative ferment (The Bet, Mood Chaser, Pleasurably Lost) results in a set the promo blurb refers to as “the dirty dub album.” Settling, in his unsettled style, on dub, his signature ludic aleatory approach is still evident, though, “Vocal Limited” finding him at play with tape-delay and varispeed making melodic rhythmic patterns with vocal samples. It’s linked with a psychedelic trip clip on 8 mm tape, serving to set the tone for the album, synths bubbling and seething molten-like, “Frontal Waves” and “Dubstore Light” coming on like BC spiked with early-Seefeel, “Sunny Echoes” and “Spacecore Dust,” hommage to Autechre, with fond nods to ’90s IDM-electronica roots. For the final “Dream Logic” he returns to go-to pulse’n’synth Kosmische template. Overall, the protean Finger probes genre with what some would call a healthy disregard—more accurately a knowing regard, pushing and prodding around a notional envelope of tropes.
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Last of the Shimmering six is Rapalyea from Bengalfuel, a project Joe LiTrenta ‘started as a way to have peaceful music playing all the time while I was moving out of a haunted house.’ (see here). This may account partly for its glide in a false divide, dichotomies denied—of dark-light, consonance-dissonance, smoothness-distortion. Rapalyea’s micro-symphonies range from celestial awe to eerie serenity, variously calm, desolate, stately, spooked. Joe and sidekick Lou (DiBenedetto) waft swathes of ambient haze far from shrinking violet or background hum, more in your face, wide open space, lush synth-drone and nature tone. Its ‘cinematic future landscapes’ fall in a Bermuda Triangle of coordinates, notionally Biosphere (“Snow Clif”), 12k (“Tall Waves”), and Hibernate (cf. Tegh & Kaymar Tavakoli). Rapalyea simmers fairly gently till a final 20-minute wig-out, “Lonniesquares.” Here more dynamic electronics and pulsating rhythm (‘I think …you can hear NIN in the beat,’ Joe says) conspire with a riot of melodics and beat mechanics, seemingly all that was restrained unbound in a flurry of beat-mash and pyro-melodics. Rapalyea is last but certainly not least, perhaps even most/best of these nicely Shimmering Moods—a selection whose finer flavours come through and endure, despite some light shop-soiling by over-ripe promo plonk. (@Shimmering Moods haven’t you heard? The Author Is Dead! Or (s)he should be!)
All albums are out now or forthcoming on Shimmering Moods via Stashed Goods (UK) and Delsin (EU).
