Unapologetically grand and emotional, this album will please those who like their ambient sounds tidy and ready for the big screen.
Artificial marks a return to purely ambient music from Derrick Stembridge, the composer behind the Drifting in Silence moniker. His work, self-released on Labile Records Inc. have ranged from brightly melodic IDM, to grinding electro of the EBM variety, to straight forward and cleanly produced ambient. While working in various genres he’s retained a commitment to polished instrumentation and a cinematic, broadly emotional feel.
These thirteen tracks all run at about 5-minutes apiece, most driven by simple, cycling pad motifs that share a particularly digital sounding sonic sharpness. Although they develop quite slowly, there is an underlying structural logic that lend a quietly compositional feel. Thursday Afternoon, Brian Eno’s 61 minute piece of hovering, static beauty, this is not. Instead, these pieces are succinct songs that are paced with counterpoint and resolution. Stembridge also differentiates each track with unique instrumentation; employing electric guitar, a curious cello imitation, and vocoder at different times. The vocoder is especially novel, rarely used in the genre outside of Robert Fripps excellent live album, Love Cannot Bear. These instrumental performances are not always particularly inspiring though; the guitar playing on “Surface” is the stuff of saccharine mood music, Windham Hill in space.
As we near the halfway point of the album, things loosen up a little, with good effect. “Origin” has a charismatic, pointillist lead that recalls the funky space music of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series without the percussive backing. Oddly enough, “Emotion” is the least emotional track on the album, broken synths outlining the contours of a desolate and obscure space with minute streams of brightness shining through. This is followed by “Stay,” a rumbling, unstable piece of dark ambient with its melodic activity obscured and backgrounded. This more ambiguous work feels the most promising and powerful.
According to the artist this album was inspired by the work of William Basinski, but one would be hard pressed to find the dead eyed repetition or fragile sonics of Basinski’s style here. True to its title Artificial, there’s an airbrushed digital sheen that signals away from the natural world and towards Hollywood sized CGI. Unapologetically grand and emotional, this album will please those who like their ambient sounds tidy and ready for the big screen.
Artificial is available on Bandcamp.
