Amosphère is a “Chinese-born, Paris-based composer and multidisciplinary artist”. And on this record, she has provided three very thoughtful pieces for us to delve into.
Land Of Eternal Delight immediately captured my interest with its curious, wheezing sound. It features hand-made ceramic instruments, flute, and apparently trumpet although that’s quite well disguised, all cycling over the rich drone of an electronic organ. I get a strong mechanical feeling from this one: I can almost picture some kind of Heath Robinson contraption with bellows and valves and pipes worked by a system of cranks and pistons. It builds slowly over its nearly 22 minute duration, and I find it deeply satisfying.
The flute is back on Teleportation, this time paired with the bleeps and bloops of a VCS 3 modular synth, providing a suitably sci-fi sheen over the soulful woodwind drone, and an intermittent rumbling bass. (I believe this is the instrument pictured on the cover, in suitably sci-fi inverse video.)
At just over 9 minutes, Black Hole In, White Hole Out is the shortest track here, although the way it fades up in media res kind of makes me feel like we’re just catching a fragment of some more timeless whole. Here we have bass clarinet and church organ. And this is one bassy clarinet, a deep raspy thrum which sounds like it is really pushing the limits of the instrument — on paper, that might give the impression that it’s hard on the ears, but it’s really not (at least, not on mine).
There’s quite a lot of theory behind this, bringing together everything from Buddhist philosophy to cosmology, which you can read about on bandcamp, if that’s your thing. For me, I’ll just say that this is some high-class drone business, imaginative and evocative, and an absolute pleasure.
I bought this from Boomkat. They call it Modern Classical / Ambient.
dogrando writes about some records 