Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Mercy – Forever

Posted: 10 January 2021 in Albums
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1st February 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Mercy is a four-piece alternative rock act propelled by vocalist and guitarist Mercedes Diett-Krendel, and the debut album by Mercy is a short but punchy guitar-driven exorcism of sorts. Most of the best music comes from a dark place, and has a personal element, and Mercedes has dredged deep into her experience to purge it all here. The self-invited comparisons to Veruca Salt, Hole, and No Doubt are all entirely fitting, in that Forever is very much centred around a strong female front person.

It begins with a rendition of the wedding march played on a heavily echoed, overdriven electric guitar… nice day for a white wedding? Nice day to start again, more like. Forever is an album brimming with ire, anguish, and angst, the soundtrack to a wedding massacre that finds the artist picking the scabs of all the shit, all the trauma… in short, it’s a summary of Mercy’s worst relationships bottled up into an epic explosion of revenge, ending in a bloody mess.

The promo shots suggest that this is more than just a theme or concept, but something far, far more intense and deeply personal, and this gives the album its ragged, sore edge.

The songs are melodic, but have edge – a grungy, 90s alt-rock edge, and it’s pretty full-throttle. The mid-album acoustic slowie,‘Gabriel’ really slows the pace, and marks an essential shift in an album that really works that classic quiet/loud dynamic, and it kicks in for a properly anthemic climax. ‘Damage’ kicks ass with an almost gypsy, folksy edge to its grunge attack, while the stomping title track is brimming with emotion. And you feel that emotion, while being buoyed along by some strong melodies.

It’s concise, and it’s fiery, and the success of Forever is in balancing the fury and the tune.

Mercy Band / Photo © Daniel D. Moses www.danielmoses.com

Sarcastic Burn Victim – Blood & Stomach Pills

Posted: 9 January 2021 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 29th January 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

The description sets the scene and the expectation perfectly: ‘True Archweigian Improve-Free-Grind-Noise-Experimental-Avant-Jazzcore. John Coltrane quadruple booked on the same stage as Extreme Noise Terror, Swans and The Incapacitants.

It sounds horrible and utterly brain-frying, and it is. ‘Deep Pan Magna Carta’ launches the album – a whopping sixteen-track sprawl that reveals something of a fixation with wolves and goats – with a barrage of crashing, chaotic percussion, gut-churning bass, wild horns and tortured vocals that spew larva from the very bowels of hell. And they’re clearly intent on dragging you there with them, into the pit of pain, because there is absolutely no fucking let-up. This is everything all at once – and while it’s relentlessly and uncompromisingly nasty, it certainly doesn’t confide itself to any one style – and as for genre, it’s a crazed hybrid mash-up, seemingly intended to inflict maximum pain – and if this is indeed the objective, they succeed.

Most of the tracks are around the minute mark – but actually feel much longer, as they drag and dredge their way through the deepest sludge. Believe it or not, that’s not a complaint or criticism, so much as an observation on how it feels to be brutally battered from all sides at once. There is, undoubtedly, an element of endurance required here.

As the band’s name and whacky, irreverent and possibly irrelevant (it’s impossible to tell without being able to decipher the lyrics) song titles suggest, we should probably only take this so seriously. But then, as the best comedians will tell you, comedy is serious business, and so it would seem is slugging out the harshest, brutal mess of noise.

Before long, they’re in full-tilt frenzied grindcore territory: ‘Wolf Goat’ is nine seconds of snarking and blastb(l)eats, followed immediately by the thirty-six second ‘Goat Wolf’, another blast of carnage that thunders at a thousand miles an hour. There’s some black metal nastiness in the mix when the snarling vocals deliver a snarling acappella intro to ‘hash, Weed, Pills, Saurkraut’. ‘Red sausage’ is about the only phrase I can pull out of the frenetic thrash that follows.

‘Natural Born Testicle’ takes a different turn: a howling blizzard of shrieking electronics and clean shouting, it’s a wild swing into power electronics, and is more reminiscent of Whitehouse than anything else.

It’s the manic horn action that really makes Blood & Stomach Pills the experience that it is. It’s chaotic, discordant, and above all, incongruous – but then again, it calls to mind the jazz-coloured noise of GOD, as well as recent work by Sly and the Family Drone – but this is probably the grindiest permutation of such crazed free jazz I’ve encountered yet.

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Of Thread & Mist – Static Hymns to No One

Posted: 7 January 2021 in Albums
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Gizeh Records – GZH101 – 22nd January 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Gizeh label founder Richard Knox already has a quite remarkable resume of musical projects, often running simultaneously or overlapping. With Shield Patterns currently quiet and A-Sun Amissa standing as his primary collective vehicle, Knox’s contributions to collaborative works over recent years have been numerous, but to fill a gap – or more likely scratch another itch – he’s stepped into the (half) light with a new solo project, Of Thread & Mist. A fair summary is that the project sounds exactly as the name suggests, and one might say representative of the Gizeh ‘house’ style’ – evocative, haunting, juxtapositional, but also evasive, intangible, ephemeral.

Static Hymns contains two longform tracks: the first, ‘Grace and Truth Perish’ has a running time of eighteen and a half minutes, while ‘A Face Full of Drunken Ticks’ is a colossally sprawling thirty-two-minute epic.

The formulation of the album centres around music ‘composed by Knox then deconstructed and manipulated via hand-made tape loops, beaten-up 4-Tracks and modified cassette players’. There’s very much a sense of artistry around the manipulation of the material, an almost avant-garde collaging, repurposing, reconfiguration, destroying – or at least disfiguring – in order to build anew.

There is something old, faded, slightly damaged about the warped, wavering tape drones that seep tentatively from the speakers to begin with, creating a sense of unease, a certain degree of disorientation, a feeling that something isn’t quite right about the way the different layers of sound rub against one another without quite connecting. It’s a slow, trickling turn as gradients of sweeping waves of sound, broad in spectra and subtly textured like pale watercolours spreading into one another, and the edges blur into indistinction.

This type of cinematic, atmospheric ambient drone is very much Knox’s signature, and he’s long demonstrated a knack for slowly shifting from light to shade and back through almost granular gradation, but where Static Hymns stands out is its almost collage-like approach in places. The different elements overlap, and not always comfortably – and this is very much in their favour in the way in which they challenge the recipient: this is no simple drone-over-and-out, but an album that proffers a sensory challenge, and as such, demands more attention than so many exercises in background drift that occupy the ambient sphere.

Toward the end, the sound again begins to waver, waxing and waning, tapering and yawning, stretching and fading in and out unpredictably, as if slowly degenerating, degrading. There are a number of abrupt false endings as the sound fragments into evermore brief flickers. It stutters, it yawns, and finally, it is done – gone, ended.

But when the sound ends, the reflection begins. Static Hymns is an album that invites reflection in the silence which follows the final notes.

AA

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Withering of Light – Reliquary

Posted: 3 January 2021 in Albums
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26th December 2020 – Lake Label

Christopher Nosnibor

There was a time when the phrase ‘concept album’ was something of a joke, a term indicative of some self-absorbed, self-important muso cack, all too often of a prog rock persuasion, with connotations of the pompous and grandiose, not to mention the overlong and immensely indulgent. Times have changed, things have moved on, and it’s no longer deemed pretentious to talk about art, at least in many circles, when it comes to the making of music. Outside the mainstream, at least, the movement against intellectualism and the war against intelligence has slowed.

It stands to reason that there would be a concept behind a sprawling forty-three-minute exploration of moody murkiness that is the latest (burnt) offering from Todd Janeczek via his dark ambient vehicle, the evocatively-named Withering of Light. As Janeczek explains, “The concept behind this album became how each of the words that are the titles took me out of the mundane everyday and put my mind in somewhat of a different state… For instance, ‘Reliquary’ is a vessel that contains a sacred or holy relic of some kind. We as humans fetishize objects, moments, memories. Even your mind can become a reliquary harboring the sacred, profane and otherwise. Each of these words I found carried some kind of weight, a spectral resonance (hence that title) and the sounds here are the aural embodiment of these.”

The dark ambient medium has always operated within the realm of the evocative, and while the pieces are born out of the artist’s internal thought processes and reflections, most of how one responds to such works is dictated by one’s own mindset, headstate, and experience. The question is therefore less ‘what is this album saying?’ than ‘what does this album say to me?’

I’ve been stuck at home for a long time with only my immediate family – wife, nine-year-old child, demented housecat – and a lot of music for company. As such, I’m not particularly attenuated to the nuances of the meaning of the song titles, and am more situated to feel the physicality of the rumbles and tensions of the dark undercurrents that course through the six compositions what comprise Reliquary. For the most part, it ushers a sense of discomfort and a sepulchral gloom that corresponds with my innate desire to hibernate. The atmosphere is dark and heavy and it hangs, lingering in the thick air. And yet… what does it say? Your back bows, and you want to move away. You want peace. But just as this has no words, you have no words.

‘Hive’ sees the arrival of percussion in the form of slow crashing cymbals and as such stands out from the thick sonic fog of the rest of the album. Apart from this, nothing happens, there is no punctuation and no other shift that adds to the appeal or otherwise draws the listener in.

‘Reliquary’ offers little more than dank darkness and dripping, a condensation of gloom that clings to every surface in the mind. It offers little enticement beyond the opportunity to sit in darkness and stare at the wall. And sometimes, that’s the soundtrack we need and the wall is ok with me.

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Procter / Poulsen – Parallel Perspectives

Posted: 1 January 2021 in Albums
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Ojud Records – 1st January 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

It may only be January 1st, but 2021 already feels very much – as expected – like a continuation of 2020. As a friend pointed out to me only this morning, in summarising the fact that the pandemic position remained unchanged and now we had the added shit bonus of having fully left the EU, ‘shit never sleeps’. Seeing so many post on social media about being glad to see the back of 2020 was somewhat depressing: I get the sentiment, and very much am on board with the significance and psychology of book-ending a period of time with the striking of midnight marking the start of a new calendar, but really, what changes? This year or ever?

One positive of this continuity is that Dave Procter is kicking off the new year where he left off the old one, namely by making and releasing more noise, and its timing is noteworthy, as a common theme within Procter’s work is some form of commemoration or ritual, with events like midsummer drone walks

This time, it’s with an alliteratively-titled work with occasional collaborator Claus Poulsen, with whom he plays one concert and makes one release every year. Parallel Perspectives is very much from the dronier end of his working spectrum, and follows Solaris (2019) and Minimum / Maximum (2018) in a continuum stretching back to 2015 and the release of his first work with Poulsen, PP. The release of Parallel Perspectives being a day late for 2020, despite having been recorded almost a year ago on 20th January 2020 also seems somehow, if accidentally appropriate, and something that won’t be lost on the artists, not least of all with Procter having relocated to Sweden ahead of the finalisation of Brexit. And works like Parallel Perspectives illustrate why: when creativity is so reliant on collaboration, free movement is essential, and this is a perfect advertisement for everything the un-UK has just thrown away in the name of ‘sovereignty’.

Not that there is anything remotely political about the album itself: this is purely a coming together of musical minds, and a celebration of their commonalities and differences – and it’s that mutual understanding, paired with an awareness of the power of contrast that make this.

As the liner notes detail, Parallel Perspectives was recorded in Copenhagen. The single track on the album is an extension of Procter’s Fibonacci Drone Organ minimalistic project, but with Poulsen adding overdubs. With his different perspective, he quickly forgets the minimalistic nature of the piece and details it with waves of half speed vinyl and samples.

An elongated organ drone hums, hovering and wavering gently in semi-stasis. Ruptures and incidentals abound, from seemingly random discordant cascades of sound and piano interjections to slow-whispering thermal winds and desolately chill nuclear gusts, and I’s remarkable just how much those details prove to dramatically colour the mood. Perhaps it’s the – for a better term – blankness of the flat organ drone that is as much key here, in that as of and in itself, it has no particular ‘mood’; it’s a neutral sound, imbued with precisely nothing. It’s only when rubbing against or along with another sound that it slides upwards or downwards, into light or darkness. There is no shortage of either over the course of the album’s fifty-three minutes, but there are many protracted passages which explore the realms of the ominous and eerie, the uncomfortable and the suspenseful, as fear chords creep like drifting mist in a dark city alley.

At times, it chimes, and at others, it grates. Sometimes it rings, and at others it drifts. At times, it swells, at others it tapers to nearly nothing. Its pace is barely perceptible, a continuously creeping shift, not so much a slow-burn as a smoulder of smoke tricking from a peat burner, and the layers added by Poulson only serve to protract the transitions, grinding a slow-motion audio that has a cognitive effect as you feel yourself slowing in line with its interminable aural crawl. And for all the moments that sounds like there is a heavy craft looming on the horizon, for all the protracted ponderous spells, there are moments that sound very like the soundtrack to breaking dawn, the soundtrack to redemption on the horizon.

Parallel Perspectives is subtle, but the devil is very much in the detail here.

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Horsehunter – Day of Doom Live

Posted: 30 December 2020 in Albums
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Magnetic Eye Records – 11th December 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Often, the measure of a band’s quality is in their live performance, especially in the domain of metal when you’re up close and can feel the force, the viscerality and the volume – although these things don’t always necessarily translate to the live recording.

Magnetic Eye Records’ document of flagship band Horsehunter ‘destroying onstage at the “Day of Doom” label showcase at Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus Bar’ in November 2019 at the event held to commemorate the label’s 10th anniversary definitely does translate and makes for an absolute monster of a life album.

The four tracks are almost a quarter of an hour apiece, and the audio quality is exceptional – that is to say, studio sound with the added bonus of live volume. Yes, this SOUNDS loud. Played through speakers and given room to breathe, the sense of volume is suffocating and exactly the way it should be – like you’re in the room as the band lay down monstrous riffs.

For the most part, the pace is a crawl, the chords grinding out slow and sludgy, with throat-ripping vocals in the middle of the mix. Around five minutes into ‘Nuclear Rupture’ things slow to the point of almost stopping, and time stalls, and in this hanging moment we find the absolute essence of Horsehunter: that moment of perfect tension that hangs before the next chord crashes in like a landslide with a power that is utterly decimating in its destruction.

There is beauty to behold, but it’s the kind of beauty elicited in the watching of the bombing of Hiroshima in slow-motion. And with its frenetic guitar solo work and gut-churning bass that thunders across the abyss with earthquake-inducing force, this live recording is little short of devastating.

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Eric Random – No-Go

Posted: 30 December 2020 in Albums
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Klanggalerie – 18th December 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s no questioning Eric Random’s pedigree, having begun his musical career with The Tiller Boys with Pete Shelley and Francis Cookso before becoming part of the post-punk and experimental milieus of both Manchester and Sheffield, recording his first solo works at Cabaret Voltaire’s studio, and later fronting Nico’s band until her death in 1988. But while many artists dine out on their former glories – and it’s true that since the majority fail to scale to any great heights, a brimming resumé is something to celebrate, there’s equally a certain truth in the belief you’re only as good as your latest work.

No-Go is his fourth album since his return in 2014 following a lengthy time out. Pitched as a step further into an electronic dance direction, and inviting comparisons to Wrangler and Kraftwerk, No-Go is brimming with 80s stylisations, and all the 808 and Akai snare cracks and robotix vocals you could imagine are crammed into these eleven tracks.

A jittery stammer runs through the entirety of the opener, ‘Synergy’, while all over, multiple other synth sounds swipe and bleep over the ultra-retro groove, and all over, Random recaptures not just the sound of the late 70s and early 80s scene in which he was so deeply immersed in, but also the feel of the period. It’s easy to forget just how vibrant the energised spirit of newness was around that time, with the rapidly evolving – and ever-cheaper – technology opening new doors to seemingly infinite possibilities. This was music that sounded like the future in every sense, and while a lot of it may sound dated now, the fact there appears to have been some kind of revival or renaissance under way for the best part of the last 30 years speaks volumes. Of course, where Random differs from the oceans of retro revivalists is that he’s not attempting to reconstruct a fantasy version of a bygone era: he was there, at the cutting edge, doing precisely this.

‘Compulsion’ is a bleak wheezy cut with tinny marching drums and vocal that are oddly reminiscent of early New Order in their flat, distanced delivery. It’d Depeche Mode that spring to mind in the opening bars of the buoyant yet bleak ‘Is the Sun Up’, but then

‘Sinuous Seduction’ leaps out on account of the sample of William S. Burroughs narrating a segment of Naked Lunch, and while one of the numerous passages about giant black centipedes may not be revelatory or even particularly inventive, it does serve as a reminder of Burroughs’ vast influence on music, in particular acts like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, who swiftly recognised the analogy between the cut-up and the sample, something Burroughs himself had initiated with the experiments he conducted with tape in the late 1950s and early 1960s with Ian Sommerville. But then, equally, there’s just something about Burroughs’ creaking, dry-as-sticks monotone that is just unbelievably cool, and also sends a unique shover down the spine, distinctive to the point of being immediately recognisable, and also really not of this world, that detached, flat intonation about stuff that’s plain weird is perfectly suited to the music of the early years of the electronic age. The track itself is sparse, monotonous, robotic, and while it’s as much an example of doomy Eurodisco in the vein of The Sisterhood’s Gift, it’s not a million miles away from The Pet Shop Boys circa Disco – and that’s by no means a criticism.

Sandwiched between this and the blustery hard-edged disco of ‘No Show’, the ‘It’s come again’ offers some welcome respite with its more loungy leanings. Things get lively to the point of dizzying with the last few tracks, which are uptempo an mega-layered with bewilderingly busy arrangements, and it’s a tense climax to an album that shudders and judders, bubbles, foams, and fizzes with electronic energy.

In going back to his roots, Random has really hit the zone and delivered some old-school stompers in the process.

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Rivet – On Feather and Wire

Posted: 27 December 2020 in Albums
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2LP Editions Mego – Digital release date: 4th December 2020 / Physical release date: early February 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Initially – and indeed, oftentimes – On Feather and Wire sounds very like so many slightly noodly minimal electro albums, incorporating elements of pop and krautrock to forge some neat synthy moments, fairly light and accessible and propelled by soft but insistent beats and bubbling bass grooves, and it’s pleasant enough, with the darker overtones providing depth and detail. Rivet’s reverence and enthusiasm for the technology is apparent, as is his appreciation for the likes of both Chris and Cosey and Kraftwerk. The invited comparisons to COH are warranted, and if the synthy explorations of the 70s and into the early 80s with the emerging industrial scene is your bag, then the appeal here is clear: there’s plenty to like, but then again, not a lot to distinguish Rivet from myriad other artists of the era or his myriad peers operating in the same field, which seems to be increasingly populous.

‘Glietende Liebe’ has hints of DAF, but then equally of Cabaret Voltaire, and even Depeche Mode with its buoyant repetitive motif. Vocals are limited just the occasional phrase, more shouted the sung, and it seems Rivet – that’s Mika Hallbäck Vuorenpää – is more than happy for the listener to wrestle – or not – with the questions of intention and meaning, as, according to the liner notes, ‘interpretation is flung open as the audience are invited to gauge what on earth is going on here… Are these songs? Are these lyrics? Words melt as beat perpetually takes us deeper into flight. Throughout this trip sharp snares punctuate ghost melodies as vocals rise and vaporise. Shadows hover the walls leaving holographic traces of the duality between fun and fear, the unexpected drifts diagonally across the audio plane teasing and taunting the listener’.

‘Keloid’ is an out-and-out minimal dance tune, and ‘Mag Mich’ is pretty much straight-up EBM, and all of this is fine and neatly executed by largely unremarkable. ‘Sodden Healer’, on the other hand is stark, clinical, dangerous in its detachment. Fragmented vocals cut across one another against a backdrop of grating analogue bass oscillations.

But ‘Coral Spate’ comes as if from nowhere, a standout and standalone, the absolute distillation of every feature of the album culminating in five minutes of claustrophobically gripping intensity, It’s the sound of anxiety, of agoraphobic panic, in ways that are difficult to pinpoint and even more difficult to express. Whereas the dislocated retrofuturism of ‘Ordine Kadmia’ sounds like so much cyberpunk and so many 80s sci-fi movie soundtracks, and is the kind of composition that’s affecting because there’s a certain sense of the unheimlich about its stark robotic repetitions and whipcrack snare sound, it’s precisely the extreme familiarity of ‘Coral Spate’ that’s so uncomfortable – suffocatingly so. And yet the experience of discovering that physical spasm articulated, given a soundtrack, is perversely comforting. It’s a rare and dichotomous sensation that’s difficult to reconcile – but then, art is at its best when it challenges us. The more it makes us feel, however much it hurts, it’s fulfilling that function of taking us beyond the limited boundaries of whatever comfort zones we may have and challenging us to confront those innermost fears by mirroring them back at us.

For this alone, this track alone, I wholeheartedly recommend this album, but maybe should forewarn those of a weaker disposition that it isn’t all breezy grooves.

AA

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Nihiti – A New Kind of Weather

Posted: 27 December 2020 in Albums
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Lo Bit Landscapes – 3rd December 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

A New Kind of Weather was composed in New York City in the first months of the pandemic, against a backdrop of global panic, and with refrigerated trucks were parked at the hospital a few blocks away from the band’s residence while the city racked up in the region of 1,000 deaths in just a few weeks in March and April. Around the same time, the brother of Nihiti’s primary songwriter committed suicide. This is the bleak space in which the band found themselves – one which, to varying extents – we can all relate to.

Here, at the end of December after an interminable year, the spring of 2020 feels like another lifetime. If anyone thinks we’ve adjusted to some ‘new normal’, they’re simply thinking wishfully. Yes, we may have been ground down into trudging through the day-to-day, existing, but the separation and isolation, the ongoing restrictions and mask-wearing has a cumulative effect. Unlike the curve, our moods may have flattened out and we may well have all but erased the spasm that was late March and early April as lockdowns began to be enforced around the globe, and what had seemed like a distant issue in distant countries suddenly became the reality on our doorstep.

The title tracks sets the tone, but also represents an early album peak as a dark, blank monotone reminiscent of Michael Gira, croons against a woozy, eerie bassline – again reminiscent of Swans: ‘There are words on Christmas day, just living right in your eyes / Asking you if you will fall to the ambulance’s siren songs’. Painting a scene of tension and claustrophobia, it grows in darkness and density with rolling tom-based percussion and layered guitars. If a track ever captured the creeping paranoia that swept so much of the western world via the news media and social media in those first few months, this is it.

Slow-oscillating synths spin slow ambient mists at the start of the twelve-minute epic that is ‘Shudder into Silence’, robotix vocal snippets cutting through the cascading crystalline digital droplets that fall like dew. A heavy throb pulses low in the mix, but rises and falls again in an ever-evolving transition of sound layers. Turning, soft, smog-like, a slow-wailing siren rings out a lonely cry. The tension is palpable.

The more conventional post-rock instrumentation of ‘Into the Sands’, with it’s metronomic drums and chiming guitars marks a significant shift – if it’s gentle and vaguely shoegazey / psychedelic it’s spun through shades of Jesu, and a maudlin, almost sepulchral feel casts a long shadow over its gothic melancholy.

The percussion-free interpretation of Roy Orbison’s ‘I Drove All Night’ is different again, and perhaps the least comfortable fit on the album – if comfortable is a word that’s appropriate for describing any of the heavy atmosphere of A New Kind of Weather. Following on, ‘The Practice of Injury’ builds heavy swirls of ambience that washes and eddies in abject desolation.

Despite only containing five tracks, A New Kind of Weather clocks in at around forty-five minutes, and fill this space with a remarkably broad range of styles, while making every moment count in terms of maintaining the darkly oppressive atmosphere throughout.

AA

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Monika Werkstatt – Ambient Session

Posted: 26 December 2020 in Albums
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DL Monika Entreprise monika 95-1, 95-2 (LC 01806)

20th November 2020 / 27th November 2020

Monika Werkstatt isn’t an individual, but a collective of female musicians and producers gathered by Gudrun Gut from the circles of her label, Monika Enterprise and Moabit Music.

Ambient Session is a document – abridged – of a two-day live project that took place at the Jewish Museum in Berlin on 26th and 27th April 2019. The liner notes detail the event, a full multimedia – and multisensory – extravaganza combining sound and light and where nothing is fixed, with the musicians performing ‘in various constellations inside res·o·nant—a walk-through light and sound installation by the Düsseldorf conceptual artist Mischa Kuball situated in two of the famous Voids of the Libeskind building. For this specific edition Monika Werkstatt activated the joined forces of Beate Bartel, Danielle de Picciotto, Gudrun Gut, Islaja, Pilocka Krach, and Sonae. The Fab Five of Silicon-meets-Analog-Machine-Music set out to invite listeners to join them on a two-day, four hours-each expedition into the yet unknown, improvising with sounds and configurations while structuring the longue durée in sustainable packages by adding and subtracting members to the flow’.

And so the lineups for the two days differed slightly, with Islaja performing on day one only, and Pilocka Krach on day two only. Who played what and when is largely immaterial, as this s very much about the overall feel. It’s impossible to get the full measure of the experience on either day, but the beauty of digital releases is that time constraints and productions costs are much less of an issue, and as a consequence, we’re afforded a luxurious full – and precise – hour of material from each day as a separate track (and a separate release). As such, Ambient Session definitely hints at the immersive nature of the performances, even though the visual and spatial elements are absent.

In a certain sense, there isn’t much to say here: listening to ‘Day One’ there are some woozy uplifts and downtunes that lurch a little like rising steeply op or down a hill in a car on a hilly road while driving at night, but for the most part, it’s a glow, vaporous wash of sound that turns and drift slowly and gradually. Subtle beats appear and disappear, and everything is quiet and understated, even when clouds gather to cat shadows into darker domains, unsettling electronic bubbling, bleeps and whistles. But mostly it’s a steady exploration of soft-edged atmospheres: not a lot actually happens, and yet, somehow, it does. It all happens fleetingly, subtly, in the background. There are fleeting moments of dissonance, and brief passages where patterns emerge – be they niggling bass motifs, looped vocal snippets, or repetitive rhythms of a more percussive nature, but large portions of the audio is given to abstract noise that hums and drones on an almost subliminal level.

‘Day Two’ feels different. More electronic, more edgy, stammering more beeps and messages undeciphered and indecipherable stop start and shudder, juddering and halting the airwaves against gliding contrails of mellifluous drone. Sonar drones, reaching out into the darkness. Dense rumbles and fear chords creeping. This is darker, more ominous, more eerie – or at least the track is. Then again, there are rippling groves and metronomic beats that pulse amidst a swathe of reverb and murky tones. How representative of the performances as a while these segments are, we don’t know.

I am, sadly, reminded of the way recorded media fails to fully convey an experience, and how footage of live sows on YouTube compel me to append any share with the caveat that ‘you probably had to be there.’ There is never any real substitute for the three-dimensional experience: sound, light, space, the interaction of different stimuli on the senses, especially when applied simultaneously. But for all that, this is an immersive pair of longform recordings, and the journey they lead the listener on is one of sedate – and sedated – curiosity.

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