(June 2010) You’d think the passing of a soul-and-music-mate would, if not totally debilitate, at least set back a musician, maybe stunt his productivity, clip his Muse’s wings. But, no, the strength of Will (Long) is seemingly irrepressible. Either that or at the time of his partner Dani Baquet-Long’s untimely demise last year a large but perfectly formed pile of unreleased material had accumulated. Whether it was drawn from a pool of previously unreleased material or all his own work, Close Proximity and the Unhindered Care-All shows the quality of Celer is not strained, but maintained, redoubled, which, given the dimensions of their oeuvre, is really saying something. Perhaps the music that was a repository for their shared endeavours and feelings functions for him – as well as for a hypothesized audience – both as a kind of sanctuary and a means of emotional displacement.
And there’s plenty of scope for this in what is a striking hour-long extract from from their swollen appendices. It comes in a triptych of 23-minute tableaux, each internally seguing through several movements – ones that move, sometimes in quite mysterious ways. “Culling the Past from Unsentient Weeks” is typical of the mixture of familiar and unwonted, of arcane and downhome, that gives Celer its peculiar Celer-ity. After starting with a seepage of sepia tones followed by ardently outfolding string surges, is sidetracked, first of all, by figures trudging over a gravelly path, before a more unsettling ambiance irrupts into the otherwise serenely depicted scape with the appearance of voices in discord; these in turn recede, as, to the soft hummings of a faraway jet plane passing by, a pacific scene is re-established, and a more luxuriant loop litany envelops the listener. On “Indentions on Summits of Hands,” it is nature that gives way to a miasma of melancholia, an undergirding bass coming to provide the solidity and solace of earth to the aerial drift and aqueous churn. The music seems to take on a programmatic aspect in tonal painting of imaginary topographies, inhabited by the quotidian human. “Tended Pouring” has a mellifluous drone hove into ear-view, in turn effaced by aqueous churning, further trudging, engine-whirr, chain-rattle suggestive of agricultural provenance; soft shimmerings are supplanted, eventually clearing the way for a higher, clearer, blue-skies ringing that seems to bespeak hope in its celestial swathes, as if the humdrum were undone by some resplendent light.
Throughout Celer’s beatitudes are bathed in a familiar palette of strings, piano, field recordings, and electronics, blending a richer classically-inflected ambience with the minimalism of their earlier work. If reference points be called for, the coordinates Close Proximity and the Unhindered Care-All adumbrate an area between the elegiac hauntings of Kirby and the crepuscular field studies of Eno’s On Land, infused with a neo-romanticism with a lineage from Barber to Basinski. Nicholas Szczepanik’s Sentient Recognition Archive label has done well to bring Celer into its developing fold, for this set is immaculate enough, not just in conception, to contend with the best works in the growing post-classical ambient-drone canon.
Close Proximity and the Unhindered Care-All is out now on Sentient Recognition Archive.
