Pressed up on a choice of crystal clear or translucent silver triple vinyl and housed in a gorgeous, super-wide spined gatefold sleeve with extensive sleeve notes about every track, Full Circle is a fitting way to celebrate ten years of A Strangely Isolated Place. Relentless in its nostalgia-pushing and heart-string tugging, all curated with such consistency, you’d be hard pressed at times to tell this is a various artists compilation.
Celebrating the tenth anniversary of the A Strangely Isolated Place imprint, label-owner Ryan Griffin has once again defied expectations by releasing an extensive compilation of material with a strict set of rules in place:
- The tracks must have been written about or featured on ASIP between its 10-yr run from 2008—2018
- The tracks must not have been previously released on vinyl and, most crucially,
- The artist must not have been previously a part of the ASIP family.
At this point, Griffin has the sort of encyclopedic knowledge of the ambient music scene that would make him an ideal talking head on, or indeed writer/producer of a comprehensive, documentary take on the genre. You’ve only to take a look at the Matrix-level wall of text that is his Ten Years of A Strangely Isolated Place – Tagged hashtag project to see that. This makes him ideally placed to put together a compilation that is a time capsule of the last ten years of ambient music.
Fair warning: If you have a problem with straightforward, melodic and emotive ambient music, please leave now via the signed exits, as Full Circle is going to feed you through an emotional and introspective wringer like you’ve never heard. It is relentless in its nostalgia-pushing and heart-string tugging, all curated with such consistency, you’d be hard pressed at times to tell this is a various artists compilation. There are some near-perfect track-to-track transitions, like the melodically similar but bass-led “Sodium Glow” by Altus—the perfect foil to Ourson’s high-altitude, heartbeat pulsing “06 237.”
Sure, there are are one of two artists featured here who’s signature sounds are so ingrained by now that they’re unmistakable (and yes, bvdub could be seen as breaking the aforementioned rules a little, but it was an Earth House Hold release that came out on ASIP, not a bvdub one), but again, expert curation has taken care of that.
ASPIDISTRAFLY channel The Sight Below, with delayed shoegazing guitar echoing above hazy ambient pads to create a the woozy hypnotic state that could easily sit on the classic Glider LP. Winterlight’s “Awake and Sleeping” weaves a melancholy looping melody reminiscent of early Brian Eno into tidal bursts of guitar feedback. Horizon Fire provide a BoC like moment with the gauzy “Piney Hills Blaze,” followed by a high point on Full Circle, another shoegaze-tinged, vocally enhanced slice of contemplative electronica from Need A Name.
Full Circle occasionally goes down starkly esoteric paths, like the retro-Americana samples heard in Ous Mal’s “Marraskuu” that you’ll find either charming or teeth-grindingly annoying, or Freescha’s peculiar “Moving” that flows through Morr Music and CCO crunch and into jangly piano of the kind you expect to hear should you walk into an old wild-west saloon.
In fact, Full Circle lingers in that old Morr/CCO audio space for the new few tracks, with Alla Farmer and Anders Ilar providing clicks, glitches, wobbly synths and various strains of treated piano. Solar Fields’ “Going In” manages to sound more like Ulrich Schnauss than the Ulrich Schnauss’ entry that immediately follows (though given that it’s a remix by Murray Fisher this is perhaps not surprising), the latter one of the melodic and emotional high watermarks. And then Bvdub ends Full Circle with his trademark maximal, grandiose ambient style, “Don’t Say You Know,” a hybrid of his two epic albums for echospace [detroit].
Pressed up on a choice of crystal clear or translucent silver triple vinyl and housed in a gorgeous, super-wide spined gatefold sleeve with extensive sleeve notes about every track, Full Circle is a fitting way to celebrate ten years of A Strangely Isolated Place.
Full Circle is available on A Strangely Isolated Place.
