(03.18.07) Infraction is turning into one of our most intriguing labels, lately
orienting itself away from its early edgy eclecticism towards replenished
forms of harmony-based ambient soundscapery. At the heart of each of its
releases has always been some ambient core, be it darker (Andrew Liles),
experimental (Ultra Milkmaids & Aidan Baker), or guitar-based drone (Koda).
Beautumn’s recent entry into the fold with 2005’s well-thought of White
Coffee represented another strand again – a cross between the space music
tradition initiated by Stearns/Roach/Rich (and taken on by the likes of
Hypnos) and something more stately and soundtrackish, perhaps the residue
of some of Alexander Ananyev’s (aka Beautumn’s) East-european cultural
legacy.
Northing strays a little further from some of the more purist ambient
territory of White Coffee, adding other elements, in particular more
pronounced beat programming, but staying true to the blueprint. Opener
“Steps” has field recordings sampled into a rhythm and emplaced in warm
analogue synthesizers – a kind of keynote address for the whole album,
heralding its flow of analogue, digital, and organic communings. Ananyev is
a musician, above all, whose atmospheric aim is true. At some points it’s
almost as if an old movie-reel were spooling away in a deserted theatre,
these pieces offering themselves as aural complement to your inner
head-cinema, the ghosts of stories infused with found sounds – rain, wind,
fire, animal calls, the raptures of metals and muffled machine music.
Sometimes grandiose, always spacious, as if in a three-ply reverb heaven,
festooned with arcing tones and drones investing the soundfield with some
arcane majesty.
Serving suggestions: “Feather Curler,” which dares to place beats up close
and personal, and hoist faraway synth-smears high and wide across the
skies. It’s ambient-techno, Jim, but not as we know it. “Blood on Your
Tongue,” starting with a rumble somewhere in Rich’s Trances/Drones jungle,
before being sub-tranced out by liminal rhythm-box syncopations. A large
mass of charged air between thunder and hum hangs, heavy, fetid. “Tebe,” an
ambient trip-hop excursion, with slow sustains leaking onto a shuffling
drum-base, a rain-wave canopy overhanging. Emotion lies long and longing
lingers around “Blanket Short”, a mere fragment of the fully 53-minute long
slowburn symphony that features on the bonus disc ( part of ltd. ed. 2CD).
As you are just about lulled into Lethe’s arms, “Garlic Serendipity” drops
hard and post-industrially, all glitchy filters, white noise, grainy e-bow,
and piston pumpings. It’s an unwelcome incursion, but it rapidly lets up to
allow “As the Snow Leaves the Ground” to resume the high-church drone-drift
rites, with glacial comb-filter tones layered and stretched out, looping
and spiralling miles-high. An exquisite musical high point is reached, and
it’s here where something like emotional resolution occurs. Last track
“Love You” is an epilogue – a simple waltz-like keyboard étude that might
have easily been omitted, for its effect is akin to bathos after the
powerful pull of the preceding quiet 11-minute snowstorm. Beautumn here
affords an arena for a new creed of travelling without moving, a journey
more existential, less blissed, an affair of wandering around and losing
and finding and losing again. Its tones are those of loss. And of space.
Lost in Space. And space music.
Northing is out now on Infraction. Buy it at the Infraction shop.
