Pause, Tobias Hellkvist’s first for Dragon’s Eye, sees the Swedish sound designer rummage through his archives and dig out a more minimalist work of a decade’s vintage and dress it up for a deserved outing.
Drone can cover a multitude of sins, but in the case of Tobias Hellkvist, it’s more a host of virtues covered over the years, having worked with various timbres on Evolutions and Everything Is Connected (Home Normal, 2010, 2012) and the increasingly long-form duration of Turquoise (Small Fragments, 2013) and Cay EP (Dronarivm, 2014). Pause, his first for Dragon’s Eye, sees the Swedish sound designer rummage through his archives and dig out a more minimalist work of a decade’s vintage and dress it up for a deserved outing.
Those who may think a drone is just a drone may leave the listening room now, for here the vertical color of sound (Tamm, 1989) is just about everything. Hellkvist’s tone is set early on—dense diaphanous swathes and sustained tintinnabulation, late in the day tweaked transportively to endlessness. It seems to give eponymously, achieving a sense of chronostasis—a kind of trompe l’oreille (Batchelor, 2007) through accretion of tones layered into a teeming harmonized expanse. The cover image offers apposite representation of how stills shift to a kind of motion within its glowing tones, Rothko-esque, each stratum as if sonorously afloat in temporal suspension.
References
Batchelor, Peter (2007) “Fabricating Aural Landscapes: Some Compositional Implications of Trompe l’Oreille“, Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (Copenhagen, Denmark, August 27-31, 2007) vol. 1, pp. 149-152.
Tamm, Eric () Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound. Boston: Faber & Faber.
Pause is available on Dragon’s Eye.
