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:: Gier Jenssen has long been one of the pioneers and pillars of the arctic ambience community. Working far north in Norway, Jensen makes music that is reminiscent of the long passages of light and darkness which play out across the frozen landscape. His website offers a number of high-quality MP3s of work that have been commissioned for art galleries and sound exhibits.
“Fluvialmorphologie v.2” sings with arctic insect and animal life — the high hum of ice crickets and the crystalline call of snow frogs. A rush of warm insect wings cuts through the air like a flood of spring water. As an Aurora Borealis display floods the sky, the insects and amphibians begin to sound their song in concert with the ebb and flow of the sky. I know that neither bug nor frog could really make it up there in the icy north, but Biosphere’s music makes me imagine an alien landscape where that is possible.
“Fluxgate” rumbles with the slow movement of massive mountains of ice. A delicate melody of soft notes precedes the grinding sound of these old glacial slabs. Biosphere opens up all the passages and portals in his Fortress of Solitude and the citadel becomes a wind instrument. Breaths of sound drift through the arctic cathedral, creating an ambient melody that rises up from deep subterranean pockets of frozen air. There is more variety of sound here in “Fluxgate,” more movement of drones and a proliferation of beats (somewhere around the 12 minutes mark) and micro-noises. “Micro Music,” in contrast, is very quiet. The breath of melodies and the subtle movement of ambient textures occur in the distance, resulting in a work that demands either headphones and a quiet environment or an active installation that aggressively submerges you in the music.
My favorite of the longer pieces collected at his website (and there are a number of shorter pieces available as well) is “Laika.” Glacially ambient like his seminal Substrata, “Laika” is filled with radio transmissions — cut-up samples from the Russian space shots. The juxtaposition of the two make the track seem like you are undertaking a solitary vigil atop a distant mountain peak near the top of the world. The air is so clear you can hear the radio waves and the atmosphere is filled with the subtle imprint of approaching snow.
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:: On going back over my review prior to a re-listen to AZ-Rotator’s Clorometiconn EP, I wonder what it was that I was listening to. My sentences are disjointed, phrases have been hacked apart and left with dangling modifiers and abandoned pronouns, and there’s a real sense of some ugly cutting and pasting going on. After listening to Clorometiconn again, I can understand the chaotic rhythm of my language. Part 8-bit Nintendo music, part Richard Devine-inspired beat terrorism and part nu-skool hip-hop, AZ-Rotator’s work flies hard and fast, trailing its melodies in its wake like an out-of-control 747 disgorging passengers through a hole in its fuselage. Opener “Hypsedian” clangs and bangs in a kitchen sink approach to electronic composition and some of that initial chaos is pared away so that a gentle string melody can find a purchase in “Ppedd.” “Fraccionadigite” offers a moment of calmer introspection in a space otherwise filled to the brim with gurgling bloops, chattering bleeps and a wealth of DSP schisms. “Etramatik” whirrs and clicks like a sinister Swiss-built clockwork mechanism that is trying to fold 4D space while “Clorometiconn” defies the previous four tracks by slipping a little ambience into the work like an 17th century Dutch landscape artist sneaking through a hole in time to doodle in a corner of a Jackson Pollack painting. AZ-Rotator isn’t quite as whiplash inducing as Otto Von Schirach (or some of the chaoticians found on Schematic) but he’s certainly taking some of the same medication.
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:: Cordell Klier has been quietly punching out ambient excursions as series of CDRs — soundscapes meant for different rooms in the house and ambient washes of sound that recreate an outdoor space. For Dark Winter, he offers up “Kingdom,” a lengthy drone track that begins with a quiet hiss and gradually — slowly — ramps up to a dark ambient hum of machinery. Nothing much occurs for the next fourteen minutes and it is only in the last two minutes that tiny shards of sound begin to percolate into the mix. A woman’s voice begins whispering as the machine drone becomes more insistent. A one-note introduction to Klier’s work, “Kingdom” drones on too long, offering an opportunity to hear the subtlety of Klier’s ambience but failing to spark much more than transitory interest.
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:: There’s a retro synth swagger to Bad Loop’s Luo, a grandiose styling of analog synth sound for the major melodies of “Nio” as if to sing the body electric all we need is an old Korg keyboard and a steady-fast desire to sweat some notes out of the dusty synthbox. Fortunately, Bad Loop surrounds the glittering melody of yesteryear with chirruping drum programming and enough fragmentary DSP wizardry that “Nio” comes off as a paean to history while hurtling into the future. “Eri Valeire” scales even higher heights, climbing into the sky like it is trying to reach Heaven on these trusty analog wings.
“Kauniit Ihmiset” sounds like a Jan Hammer mood piece set to shuffling variable-speed minimal dub out of Cologne while “Mmin” starts with big visions of grandeur but gets knocked off track by its syncopated rhythm section, resulting in an analog melody that struggles to get enough speed for flight with each revolution but is always tripped up a glitch in the system. “Kannas Nsp” is the final track of Luo and it throws off all restraints, building a big symphonic sound over a spurting, gurgling waterfall of DSP beats. The previous tracks were but warm-ups for the big finish and “Kannas Nsp” clears whatever reservations you may have left about Bad Loop’s fascination with analog keyboard sounds. Delicious in a way the ’80s could never be.
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:: As the micro-symphony of small percussion and thin synths build their melodic structure in “Anthropology Lesson,” the opening track of Konsumprodukt’s Forthcoming Joy, the interaction of the individual elements drives home the idea that each has its own respective and vital part to play in the bigger composition. This is the essential methodology of Konsumprodukt’s tracks: layering disparate elements atop one another so as to build lop-sided compositions that shouldn’t be nearly as entertaining as they are. Children’s voices sing along with organic synths in “Modesty Helps One To Go Forward” while in “The Joy of Communication” a cut-up sample of a 1950’s telephone center operator is looped back on herself several times so that she sounds like a trio of Stepford Wives providing backup as a rack of analog keyboards squirt out a retro-kitsch robotic pop song.
“Consejos Morales” is a fluttering atmosphere of darting melodies while a woman intones, I dunno, a shopping list maybe in some foreign language (yes, I am so poorly equipped to be a good global citizen). In “Le Camarade,” it is a man’s voice reading the instructions for repairing a VCR in French that accompanies the bouncing synths melody. That probably isn’t what he is reading, but the surreal impression left on my brain by Konsumprodukt’s darling electro melodies and strange collision of sounds leaves me feeling like I’ve just heard a Bretonian take on homemade electronic pop ditties.
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:: The phrase that comes to mind with Jack Haberfield Origins is “soundtrack techno,” action loops that generate a flickering screen of cinematic stills in my head. Taking note of the fractured rhythms of more left-field IDM, Haberfield dodges the brain-drain of four on the floor techno by giving his loops little hitches and kicks that keep them bobbing and weaving in your head. His synthetic flourishes and ambient washes paint landscapes with Technicolor splashes. “Cycle” breathes with gusts of steam and percolates with escaping bubbles of expanding gases while the venting steam of “Stranger” becomes a backdrop for Spanish-inflected guitar and street-sticked polyrhythms. “Sanctuary” makes a bulge in your speaker with a dub-licked washing machine rhythm while a 1960’s sci-fi TV serial anthem is recast as a bit of psychedelic theme music. The light flutter of keyboard work in “Juniper Trees” cast Haberfield’s final track in the role of melancholic closer, the poignant separation from a party that is over just as it seems like it is really getting started. “Juniper Trees” skips like an ethereal phantom, the drum programming as light and airy as the tripping keyboard melodies. Haberfield wants to get in your head as you go. Damn him. Origins is too deft and too brief to leave anything but a tremendous ache for more.
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:: Aidan Baker builds tracks out of guitar tones and, usually, his work is much more ambient and long drone based. He’s still got the proper distance perspective on Tense Surfaces but there is a percolating, shuffling loop in the foreground that keeps the tracks fluid and in motion. “Eyes Are Dark &” flows like dark water, undulating endlessly past you, while “Encase/Enclose Me” opens with the sound of a first year student’s piano recital being held underwater. Tiny bursts of electronic detritus scatter across the landscape of muffled and marred notes. The final section of Tense Surfaces is the thirteen minute “I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed” and Baker’s lo-fi ambience whispers of wind through old metal tubes and distant coyote calls in the desert darkness. Breathes of glitch like meteor showers streak across your speakers, slicing the drifting loop of Baker’s dusty ambience with streaks of falling noise. Tense Surfaces is an active departure from the glacial movement of Baker’s earlier work that I am familiar with and is a very delightful surprise.
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Essential Band Links ::
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