An invitation to flow through ethereal streams and to adopt a contemplative listening posture. Easily recommended for fans of emotional and organic ambient sculptures.
Through a multitude of publications and labels, the modern facet of the ambient genre has reached a pinnacle during recent years. Honestly and personally I consider that this musical universe now tends to be extremely redundant. However not everything is lost and a few nice projects still come to the light. North Atlantic Drift is one of them. This project is still young but has already delivered a handful of releases on Polar Seas. The duo (Brad Deschamps and Mike Abercrombie) comes from Toronto, Ontario and delivers pleasant instrumental and partly electronic soundscapes which are reminiscent of soothing organic ambient music which sometimes fuse post-rock experiments.
As suggested by its name, Departures, Vol. 1 is an invitation to flow through ethereal streams and to adopt a contemplative listening posture. It works fine here because the textures admit micro changes and a wide variety of situations, playing with time / space parameters. My favorite tracks are the soaring and ghostly “March to the Capital” (which almost has a Tangerine Dream like flavor during their late Virgin Years), the infinitely droning “Temperance,” and the slowly moving “Dream Sequence.”
A meaningful and dronescaping album which has embalming effects on the soul. The result is somewhere between Ben Frost’s fragile, solitary electronic minimalism, Brian Eno’s discreet music, Vidna Obmana, Loscil or Olan Mill. The whole dozen tracks are very intimate, captivating, sinuous and evocative. Despite there is nothing really new here, this beautiful and well composed release is easily recommended for fans of emotional and organic ambient sculptures.
Departures, Vol. 1 is available March 17 on Polar Seas.
“Pretense” video premiere ::
“This piece is one of the shorter tracks on the album and has a bit of a sound collage feel to it. We tried to condense quite a few elements into a more concise piece of music. There are several guitar and synth loops coming together to form a pretty dense whole, all culminating in a slow fade out of tremolo static. The video for this track attempts to capture the abstract nature of the song, with footage of strange druid-like figures filmed by Kiarash Sadigh, and then re-shot on super 8 camera, then degraded even further, resulting in something that has the appearance of old found footage.” ~North Atlantic Drift
