Fluidities may look like a double CD ambient release lying there on
your desk — with two full hours of expansive headspaces in which to
get completely lost — but Jonathan Hughes has actually compiled these
tracks specifically to be stacked atop one another. Each of the
twenty-two tracks is approximately six minutes in length and half are
by Hughes or Hughes and a collaborator and the other half are by
recognizable names in the ambient field — Tetsu Inoue, Saul Stokes,
M. Bentley, Ian Boddy, Ambient Temple of Imagination and Dean
Santomieri to name a number of them — and while you can certainly
listen to them in serial or in random patterns, the real depth and
mystery becomes clear when you follow the specific directive of the
release and overlap the tracks. Fluidities is the infinite
possibility of combination and recombination waiting to be unlocked by
your clever little fingers.
I pulled a random playlist from each CD and ran them simultaneously,
immediately losing touch with what element came from which track. The
texture of the ambience that swirls around you in definitely denser:
washes of sound envelop tiny particles of space noise, long tones are
pushed along by the irreverent rattle of tiny percussion, drones are
compressed and broken up by granules of glitch, and glacial piano
melodies drench tiny bursts of processed field recordings from
suburbia like the slow fall of winter snow.
There are 121 distinct combinations of two-layered compositions (and
endless more when you stack them deeper) and here are just a few of
the pairings I that I tried. The gentle melodies of High Skies’ “The
Shipping Forecast” find a complementary rhythm in the desert sand
percussion of Jonathan Hughes & Naryan Padmanabha’s “Feel the
Photons” while the combination of Saul Stokes’ “Summer” and
dreamSTATE’s “Molten” sizzles with the extra burden of heat coming off
the commingling of the tracks. The dictaphone salesman of Hughes’
collaboration with Hussalonia says, “We are getting a lot of
disturbing sounds” just as the first swell of deep ambience space
noise from Hughes’ collaboration with David Mussen (“Two Thirteen”)
bursts out of the speakers, and later tones play against slow strings
in a ready-made duet. An unconscious ebb and flow between elements
rises from combining Susanne Brokesch’s “Hostile Phone” with Tetsu
Inoue’s “Soft Dome,” as the brittle tones of Brokesch’s track break
apart, Inoue’s drones become heavier and drift closer to the
foreground.
Jonathan Hughes has realized a very unique vision with Fluidities.
While the individual tracks are minimal and sparse ambient excursions,
the possibilities explode when the tracks are combined with each other
and the sonic experience becomes an exercise in close listening.
Everything is possible, nothing is true with this one release. I
randomize again and it is a completely different record. You must
explore.
Fluidities is out now on Foundry Records.
