Cheery album title, eh? Indeed, this album starts out in pretty mournful mould, reminding me of one of the more sombre string sections from a Godspeed or Silver Mt Zion record. (There’s also something Constellation-like about the track listing, which contains wonders like “Dislocated Harmony i. into small Cold EYES ii. Several Miles Above”. Well, […]
Tag: genre_ambient
One of the things that overly earnest indie/alternative types like to say is this: it’s all about the music. What a load. I’d like to advance the following as a reasonable working hypothesis: not one thing, in the whole history of human endeavour, has ever been all about the music. I’m throwing out this poorly-developed […]
This is… wow, I don’t know what this is. It’s bloody great, though. Let’s start with Music For The Quiet Hour. Through five long tracks, fragments of alien-sounding melodies and rhythms circle around, sampled whooshes and whirrs swirl in and out, and through it all runs a very earnest spoken word piece. It’s like some […]
This is 55 minutes constructed out of “Original environmental recordings done at multiple underwater and abovewater [sic] locations in the Panamá and Paraguay rivers”. He even made it in his mobile studio on a boat. The effect is a detailed and immersive soundscape. It’s not all whale-song, though: there are spooky cavern-like episodes, all drips […]
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Grouper: A I A (2CD, Kranky, April 2012)
I’d never quite got Grouper (aka Liz Harris) before. I remember the fuss about 2008’s Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, and at the time I didn’t quite see the attraction. After taking the plunge with this double album, though, I’m a fully paid-up fan. Let’s start with the more conventional half, Alien Observer: […]
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Mohn: Mohn (2CD, Kompakt, April 2012)
Wolfgang Voigt and Jörg Burger’s debut album is very much in the spirit of Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series: this is big, chewy, elastic, in-your-face ambient, full of big crashing noises and dubby swooshes, atmospheric but with as much sense of fun as darkness… it borders on the perky in places. It even has a reasonably […]
The other day, I was listening to Raudio’s stream of Leif Inge’s 9 Beet Stretch, which slows the glorious Ninth of Ludwig van down to fill 24 hours. (I assume this must have been inspired on some level by Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho?) In places, this is what Leyland Kirby’s latest reminds me of: an unmistakable […]
People laugh at me when I describe A Winged Victory For The Sullen as a post-classical/ambient/drone supergroup. Not quite sure why. To be fair, the description is stretching the point somewhat: both pianist/composer Dustin O’Halloran and Stars Of The Lids’ Adam Wiltzie are pretty super, but two hardly makes a group; however, the record does […]
I was pretty much sold on this compilation from the first three artists: Goldmund, Leyland Kirby, and Svarte Greiner are all favourites around these parts. The (previously unreleased) tracks are all as lovely as you’d expect. The downside is that lovely tracks is just what they are: call me an old rockist, but I find […]
When I read that this record was sourced from old 78s played through antique gramaphones (HMV Model 102s, if you need to know), I imagined something swathed in old-timey crackles in the manner of Philip Jeck or Leyland Kirby. Far from it: there is a gentle background hiss in places, but the key elements of […]
dogrando writes about some records 