The whole naturally transcends reductive description in deeper listening mode, from which arises a tenor marked by a kind of wistful unease.
Stretched and saturated loops with micro-variations
NY-based ambienteers Viul and Benoît Pioulard team up for an album drawing on a sense of uncertainty and isolation emergent in lockdown. For Konec (‘end’—Cz.), alluding seemingly to a transformation experienced in their home city, A Strangely Isolated Place hosts longtime friends and collaborators, Luke Entelis and Thomas Meluch, as they seek to capture something of the world’s turn amid the pandemic. Benoît Pioulard will be known to adepts of ambient drone (and lo-fi post-rock/pop-tronica, to coin a sub-genre tag), some of his more compelling movements being logged here over the years—see e.g. Elsewhereness Revisited #7, #9 (scroll through), and Sylva. Viul will be less familiar, however, and undeservedly unsung with fine work, Bright Decline on Meluch’s self-release outlet, Disques d’Honoré, and Outside The Dream World on Past Inside the Present.
Initial short synth sketches by Entelis were jointly worked into a series of ‘short interludes’ with “a sense of vitality breaking through the immediate surrounding dread.” Tracks are extended via deployment of a looping sensibility with a sonic aesthetic rooted in distortion and delay, muck and melody. The likes of “Returning Clear Voice” and “Flaxen” stand out in their timbral turns—a fog of unknowing of a city gone off-land. Tracks such as the roiling “Catalune” and “Construction Worker Smoke Cycle” or the spooked “Canon” and “A Real Place” lend Konec a gritty storied air, channeling a haze of nostalgia waves via the—sometimes aleatory—recursions of their stretched and saturated loops with micro-variations in samples and instrumentation throughout.
The whole naturally transcends reductive description in deeper listening mode, from which arises a tenor marked by a kind of wistful unease. Mastered, like much that matters in this musical sphere, by mastering maestro Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studios.
Konec is available on A Strangely Isolated Place. [Bandcamp]
