Abdicant :: I Am Not Sure How This Makes Me Feel (Mahorka)

A beautifully crafted minimal ambient album, impactful and which creates enough emotions, enveloping textures, and calmly embalming melodies to seduce avid listeners of quiet and lush atmospheric music.

The whole musical scenery is delicately inviting

Scientific engineer, software developer, and electronic sound artist Jeremy Rice is known for his plural researches in the world of synth music and digitalized ambient reveries/escapism. His new effort published on the indie and adventurous music label Mahorka represents the most soothing and spacey-drone facets of his musical production. Serenely evolving patterns built on sustained synthesized chords meet sparse melodies of uplifting nostalgia. The whole musical scenery is delicately inviting, flowing mysteriously in vast spaces; immersing the listener in deep quietness and meditative introspection. The sonic quality and tone colors are subtly brought to the fore thanks to a wide palette of layers, tools and effects.

The ebb and flow remains contagious as “Signs and Symptoms” follows an ethereal and dreamlike voyage, as if to call upon another dimension we’ve yet to experience. And it’s all slowly buried midway through with a succinct and curious dive into darkness with “A Point of Pain that Needs to be Touched.” A rumbling synth strand maneuvers around distant voices as the track simply drifts away. While the album seeps into our subconscious, tracks like “Apophenia” pull us just a bit farther where wide open spaces expand and the journey really only just begins. Subtle beat patterns emerge on “Senescence,” a textural avalanche of soundscapes and eerily serene vistas coming into focus, reminding us of earlier shoegaze moments by Ulrich Schnauss and Syntaks. Closing with a couple of otherworldly synth brushing on “Bánh mì” to the cascading bells and atmospherics on the FSOL-inspired “Tokyo,” and one quickly realizes that Abdicant has crafted the ambient equivalent of a gorgeous sunset from a planet we’ve yet to discover.

All in all, a beautifully crafted minimal ambient album, impactful and which creates enough emotions, enveloping textures, and calmly embalming melodies to seduce avid listeners of quiet and lush atmospheric music. Fans of evocative and shimmering electronic music such as Loscil, Celer, Northaunt, Offthesky, Antonymes (et al) will find here a key interest.

Review by: Philippe Blache and Pietro Da Sacco

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“The author’s memento mori, composed during a time of illness and recovery. Ruminations on the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs as “true.” A chaotic mixing of musical influences, hardware and software, rhythm and tonality, light and dark.”

I Am Not Sure How This Makes Me Feel is available on Mahorka. [Bandcamp]