Six slabs of sonic ice sculpture slide glacially along an ambient-techno cline, threads spread below an oceanic surface over which floats a sonorous mass pulsing slow dub hyp-gnosis; narcotic guitar shards and environmentalia.
An ice cellar of medical, alimentary and ceremonial import in palaces and castles of Edo and Meiji period Japan, Himuro was a cold room between which ice could be transported in summer, sometimes moving as far as 500 km. A suitable case for treatment, then, in Glacial Movements‘ Iceberg series, under which banner ice mass is celebrated, previously Arktica, Zastrugi, now Himuro, with Netherworld and Eraldo Bernocchi presiding.
Seasoned campaigners both, prime Glacial mover Alessandro Tedeschi has his Netherworld credentials spread across Fario, Mondes Elliptiques, Penumbra, as well as GM, cf. Morketid (2007), Over the Summit (2011), Alchemy of Ice (2013), Zastrugi (2015), while ‘relentless sound explorer’ Bernocchi, for whom this astonishingly marks a 100th album, trails a long and diverse array of colluders, including Harold Budd, Nils Petter Molvaer, Bill Laswell, DJ Olive, Mick Harris, Russell Mills, Thomas Fehlmann, Toshinori Kondo, Professor Shebab, Markus Stockhausen, and Robin Guthrie, inter alia. Himuro is fruit of two years of exchange, Tedeschi providing a stream of tones and textures for Bernocchi to build on—base for bass, guitar-scape, and beat treatment. Six slabs of sonic ice sculpture slide glacially along an ambient-techno cline, threads spread below an oceanic surface over which floats a sonorous mass pulsing slow dub hyp-gnosis; narcotic guitar shards and environmentalia. In vast tracts of elsewhereness articulated via dark materials and dream weaponry, from caliginous isolationism to sunblind whiteout, targeting ‘ambient, dub, space and distance,’ Bernocchi finds felicitous balance between ambient drift and rhythmic shift—a kind of kinesis brought to bear on Budd for Fragments from the Inside (Sub Rosa, 2005).
Emil Cioran‘s The Book Of Delusions is chosen for expressive linkage, a salient extract exhorting: ‘To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; […] the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; […] to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation.’
Himuro is available on Glacial Movements.
