Forms rather takes their patented minimalist romanticism and overlays components more subtly suggestive of biotic patterns and cycles, setting up a fine balance—of experimentation and harmony, long-form drones and hushed acoustic twinkles, daubings of nature sound and soft electronics, ending up dense yet gossamer-light, at once particulate and dissolved.
Pausal return with another outing on Barge, continuing from where last year’s Autumnal, and before it acclaimed debut, Lapses, and EP left off. Forms finds the New Forest’s finest not entirely unaltered, though fans needn’t fret, for change brings with it no genre paradigm shift—no dubstep bass wobble or industrial clangor. It’s more towards aspects of composition and programme that these artisans of Ecstatic Drone’s heads are turned. Naturalist Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur with its meticulous documentation of forms seemingly inspired not only title and artwork, but also the cartography of musical content. While Ambient’s cosy sense of place was eschewed on Autumnal to explore seasonal affiliations, the properties of Forms feel differently configured, familiar musical contours somehow differently mapped. Each segment, while endowed with its own individuality, is perceptibly part of an integralist whole. Dr Haeckel, we presume. “Micro-orchestral music played with minimalist economy” is still the banner, but a more developed sense of space and structure is evinced in the album’s four loose movements, as is a widened ambit of source sounds; Alex (Smalley) and Simon (Bainton) still cleave to guitar and laptop, but the lads’ sampler has clearly been loaded up with dusted-off vinyl booty—from parings of 60s girl groups and 70s Chanson pop to Mahler and Vivaldi offcuts—to paste over a base formed of live performance and rehearsals in a landscape afforded by a secluded (natch) Welsh barn.
“We have utilised more electronic elements and textures in this record whilst retaining much of the bucolic impressions from our earlier work,” they proffer. They have too. As much as Forms turns to nature, it’s tuned to culture, and to art/ifice, immediately audible on opening keynote, “Fertiliser / Horticulture / Mower,” with silvery slivery signifiers of insectoid digitalia let loose to flit around the river (and birds) running through it; drones gestates to homespun harp-pluck sprinkle and piano twinkle. In the restless flux and mutability of “Milk Whistle / Pollen Counter” percolating drones upwell into swarming hymnal swathes, moving along the electronic-acoustic cline to take on some Popol Vuh tones. Sometimes a more mimetic linkage with the Haeckel-ian programme suggests itself, the aerial micro-orchestrals of “Fruiting Bodies / Liberty Capped” bespeaking bright buddings and swirling soft-blown static spores. This and the final “Lawn Aura / World Away / Decomposition” take from Pausal’s past triumphs, spinning in a glitchy sample soup, remote nature-rhythms seen through a loop haze darkly, to achieve a sonic confluence of swell-relent ebb-flow movements—way up high close to the electro-acoustic peaks of Mountains (cf. Choral), while zither-y timbres, synth-clouds and guitar loopism tap into an Ur-ambient spirit redolent of Thursday Afternoon-period Eno and the odd 70s New Age and Kosmische promptings.
Overall, Pausal’s paean finds fresh new skin for an old ambient ceremony, drawn not directly from ambient’s normal grand metanarratives of nature. Forms rather takes their patented minimalist romanticism and overlays components more subtly suggestive of biotic patterns and cycles, setting up a fine balance—of experimentation and harmony, long-form drones and hushed acoustic twinkles, daubings of nature sound and soft electronics, ending up dense yet gossamer-light, at once particulate and dissolved. “This record is our audible tribute in respect to life forms everywhere,” the two effuse. And from the grid-like cover with its collection of curios of plants and shells and other vital forms to the blooming sound habit—musical mien minutely themed right down to its horticulturally-turned track titles, this is the Future Sound Of Hampshire’s very own Life Forms.
Forms is out now on Barge.
