It has very spacious music, minimal development, and is best enjoyed on a medium volume level, filling up your space without being too much of a presence.
Based in the world of drone music, deep and atmospheric
White text on yellow; a recipe for disaster. I couldn’t make a single word here. Luckily, a press text informs that this is a reissue of an album originally released in 2008 on the Slow Flow Rec label. The music was recorded when Celer was a duo of Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long, who passed away in 2009. It’s a release from the days when they were very active with releases, and I reviewed quite a few of them. Browsing old reviews for Celer, I learned I quickly used them as a point of reference, quite an accomplishment, I think. I reviewed Cursory Asperses in Vital Weekly 668:
“Another release comes from the active forces of Celer, the duo of Will Thomas Long and Danielle Baquet-Long. One that lasts an hour and that has one track, “Cursory Asperses (in 8 Parts),” but all eight parts get a title. Why not index the release at those eight tracks in a continuous mode? Perhaps there is logic there somewhere. This new piece(s) is based ‘around the single concept of slow movement‘, which is true. Perhaps it’s so slow that I didn’t detect eight different pieces on this release, or maybe that was never the idea. It is built from field recordings, such as an isolated stream in the woods and the laundry hanging on cords in the backyard; Celer crafts once again a piece of high and mighty music based in the world of drone music, deep and atmospheric. It’s hard to see the difference between their previous works or, from a larger perspective, the world of drone music. Cursory Asperses is an excellent work, but without many surprises.” (some language is now corrected)
Oddly, today, I hear them as individual pieces of music. Still, perhaps it helps that there are now eight track titles (also listed on Discogs on the original release, but I no longer recall how that was on the original cover). The information with the current version tells us (I am not unsure if I knew this with the original release, or if I was assuming all that I wrote with that old review) about cassette recordings on rivers, streams, and lakes along with synthesizer, organ, cello, piano and bowed instruments, along with free software; way before using DAW and VSTs, they used ‘non-realtime convolution processing‘, using the water recordings as an impulse for instrument recordings. Had I not known this, I would have easily written something like MAX/MSP or time-stretching software.
The music is very much Celer of that time, but also, as we still know, Will Long’s solo work. It has very spacious music, minimal development, and is best enjoyed on a medium volume level, filling up your space without being too much of a presence. Ambient might be the word I am looking for.
Review by: Frans de Waard / Vital Weekly #1426. Reprinted with permission.
Cursory Asperses is available on Room40. [Bandcamp]
