Marvin Ayres :: 3xReviews (Burning Shed)

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(08.22.05) Marvin Ayres builds ambient classical music through electronic
manipulation of stringed instruments, building vast landscapes of
evolving notes that sound like chamber orchestras playing century-long
compositions meant entirely for the enjoyment of whales.
Cellosphere and Neptune (both released around the turn
of the century on Mille Plateaux) are filled with long pieces that
perambulate like the movement of glacial till and sign like the
settling of old terrain.

The twelve minute “Cellosphere” (which opens the album of the same
name) whispers and chirps like the voices of ghostly gulls, their
distant cries stretched by time until they are nothing much more than
a wistful avian murmur. The twenty-two minute “Jeannie” wanders with
such melancholy that we can’t avoid the sense of loss and despair that
fill these echoing reverberations. And “Sensory” — ah, “Sensory” —
the cello has such a way to reach down into your heart and make it
weep, and Ayres holds nothing back with gorgeous waves of sound that
roll over you like a hundred years worth of unrequited love and
wistful longing. Buy it at Amazon.com.

Neptune is more experimental, more spacious than simply
radiantly gorgeous, as Ayres fiddles with the range of sounds that can
be created from his electric instruments. Songs like “Sea Minor” rise
and dip like the undulations of a strange sea serpent, the coils of
his body making alien wave patterns as he swims through a turgid sea,
while “Tug” is filled with falling stars and weeping sirens. “Wave,”
built exclusively from electric violins, is a layered undulation of
notes much like the endless cycle of foam against a shoreline, each
peak falling into the receeding echo of the previous cycle. “Under
Blue,” composed of electric cello tones, is a more sonorous
arrangement, an indolent adante that feels like you are slowing
drifting beneath the crisp surface of a vast lake. While
Cellosphere explored long tone variations, Neptune bends
and arcs like a möbius strip, the notes twisting themselve inside
out as they loop back on their tails.

Ayres, a graduate of Trinity College of Music, utilizes the electric
cello, viola and violin, taking advantage of both the shortcomings and
harmonic effects of these instruments. His efforts (as he says in the
liner notes of Neptune) are to “innovatively explore and
re-contextualize these instruments, and try to discover rich new
combinations and textures.” Working in the studio, he extrapolates
and mutates the notes and harmonics of the instruments into
fascinating drifts of sound. These drifts of sound have been married
to visual elements and mixed into 5.1 sound spaces for the
Sensory DVD (also released by Burning Shed). Containing three
tracks (“Sensory” which was added to the Cellosphere re-release
on Burning Shed, “Cycle” and “Scape”), Sensory is an immersive
dream-like experiment that both soothes and envelopes the listener.

Both “Sensory” and “Cycle” revolve around generative systems, pools of
water that move and ripple in accordance to simplistic instructions.
“Sensory” is a circle of light, changing and warping with color as the
music shifts and bends, while “Cycle” begins with a carefree shot of
green leaves and morphs into a Mandelbrotian pattern of boxes and
lines overlaying the slow pan of the camera across the tree limbs and
leaves. They are, much like the music, visual impressions meant to
entrance and distract your eye the more you examine them. “Scape,”
the final piece of the visual trio, is a treated view of South London,
a very slow pan across the horizon that has been treated and processed
into a series of tone pictures — all awash with reds and sepias and
negative tints. While the Ayres’ violin contorts itself into several
hundred voices, the neighborhood undergoes a transformation from black
and white to blood red. It’s slightly unverving and hypnotic. Gomes’
videos mirror Ayres’ seemingly simplistic music: the more you involve
yourself, the more you can discover — the greater the depth to the
layers. Both are exercises in observation. You can, like Brian Eno
says about ambient music, ignore them and let them color your
environment; but, the reward for active participation is to have your
eyes and ears turned inward, exploring eternity beneath the ambience
of sound and infinity beyond the visible lines.

All three releases are out now on Burning Shed.