Posts Tagged ‘Celer’

Celer – Capri (Remastered Deluxe Edition)

Posted: 30 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Two Acorns – 15th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Remastered reissues can be more than simply an event for collectors, and aren’t always an act of exploitation on the part of the label or the band. In some instances, such as this, they afford the opportunity for a work to be released as was initially conceived, or otherwise tweaked to iron out imperfections which have rankled for years. And they also provide an opportunity to reflect and reassess – for both the artist and the listener. This is also true in this instance, particularly for me in my capacity as listener. As such, it’s worth sharing from the accompanying note:

‘Originally released in 2009, Capri is a concept album composed of fragmented vignettes, lost minutes and scenes from an idyllic imagining. A collection of brief moments, suspended shimmers, and frail settings, Capri was never meant to be more than its own thin veneer; a naked and subtle wash of saturated and semi-transparent colors, rolling as gently as ocean waves against rocky beaches, of fading afternoon sunlight, of momentary experience. Peaceful yet isolated, quiet yet collapsing, they are fading moments without definite borders, directions, or conclusion.

‘Remastered by Stephan Mathieu from the original tapes, and expanded to include the complete recordings excluded from the 2009 CD edition, this collection is finally present in its complete form in the deluxe edition as a black vinyl 3xLP, and 2CD. All music by Danielle Baquet and Will Long, 2007-2008.’

Presumably for reasons of length, the original release featured truncated versions of the tracks. Given the fleeting, fragmentary nature of the compositions, a piece cut here and there was likely deemed reasonable and barely noticeable, a fair trade for keeping the album down to a single CD (released in a limited edition of 400) back in 2009. It was one of the first Celer albums to be released on a label, after all, after Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long (who would leave a short while later) had spent the first years of their career doing everything the DIY way and producing physical releases by hand. So this is the restoration the album as intended some seventeen years ago.

My first encounter with Celer was in 2014, and at the time, the minimal nature of their ambient forms only had limited appeal, and my reviews, while positive, were brief, partly because I was knocking out up to half a dozen short reviews a day, and partly because I didn’t find there was much to say about albums which contained, to my ear as it was, not a lot of sound. And this, then, is the re-evaluation, the reflection, the reassessment – and the admission that not only has my palette expanded over the years, and I’ve become more accommodating, more amenable to different forms, but that I was perhaps not capable of listening so closely, not as attenuated to nuance and detail twenty-two years ago as I am now. That doesn’t mean my hearing’s improved (because that’s highly unlikely) or my attention is greater (it really isn’t: lockdown and worsening anxiety in the subsequent years have had a substantially detrimental impact there), but perhaps because of these things, in addition to an evolving appreciation through exposure, I’ve found that concentrating on musical works of a sparser nature can be quite therapeutic.

‘Falling in Trickles’, one of the longer pieces on the new edition, at three and three quarter minutes, was omitted from the original release, as were ‘Red Elements’ (5:40) and ‘I Slow for Love’ (2:50). And it’s here that it becomes apparent just how cropped down the 2009 release of Capri really was, with twenty-nine track, compared to the thirty-six of the new edition.

Given the nature of the material, the question of precisely how much impact the cuts made to the overall listening experience is debatable: as with so many Celer releases, Capri is abstract and nebulous, more about the overall experience than specifics. There’s no ‘hey, here comes a good bit’ nudge moment. The fact is, there are no ‘moments’ to be found here, just a succession of vaporous drifts, textures and tones which resonate against one another to create subtle shifts in atmosphere. ‘Bracelets Passed To Spanish Hands’ brings piano to the fore, but the sound is still in soft-focus, and at a minute and a half long, it feels more like a dream, fleeting, ephemeral, than anything – and this is in many ways a fair summary of the album as a whole. On the original edit, only ‘Lint White’ (at an expansive, ponderous seven and a half minutes) surpassed the four-and-a-half minute mark, with most pieces rising up and fading away after just a couple of minutes, and the fact that each piece is distinct and separate instead of one drifting or melting into the next creates more of a sense of a sketchbook – in this case, a huge portfolio of sketches, incomplete, in progress… but then, so often the finished work polishes away the essence of that sketch. Nothing about Celer suggests an immediacy which might be diminished through the expansion of the ideas presented, and yet… and yet. Listening to the drifting fragments, many of which are barely two minutes in length, there’s a sense of… something incomplete, like a dream or a thought that slips from your mind in an instant.

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Will Long – Long Trax 4

Posted: 3 February 2025 in Albums, Recommended Streams and Videos
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Long Trax Productions – 31st January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The brief liner notes are almost as perplexing as the cover art and the rest of Will Long’s Bandcamp page. I mean, you might think that the title is the key here. While clocking in around the eleven-minute mark, these compositions, as much as they’re far from short, well, I’ve certainly heard many longer trax, with many albums featuring a single twenty-minute piece on each side. But of course, it’s a pun. Sort of. Regardless, spreading these four tracks across four sides of vinyl feels somewhat indulgent, although I won’t go quite as far as to say exploitative, despite the temptation.

Will Long has to date created an extensive catalogue of work, both with Celer, since 2004, and as a solo artist – and when I say ‘extensive’, I mean extensive, with Celer having released around a hundred albums (if you include collaborations and compilations), and his solo output is equally overwhelming in volume. The Long Trax releases have arrived sporadically between other releases, and are broadly connected, in stylistic terms. As Long puts it, ‘round 4 of the Long Trax series [is] the pivotal moment of truth. Four new deep cuts spread across 4 sides of vinyl in dual sleeves, and spun onto disc. An all-analog, hardware machine affair, full of glacial pads and icy stabs, rhythm composure (composer) sequences, round booming basslines, and narrators from beyond. It’s the real thing, still chugging along.’

Less than a minute into ‘One in the Future’, I’m feeling late 90s chilled techno vibes, and I’m dragged back to a handful of club experiences where I fucking hated the music and I hated the posers.

I’ll admit, I’ve always had something of a fraught relationship with dance music and its culture. I suppose I’ve generally leaned towards rock, but have found spaces in my head and heart for some dance and adjacent, loving the KLF from the start, and so much of the electronic music from the late 70s and early 80s. Chris and Cosey’s Trance is a straight-up dance album, and I dig it not just because it’s a Throbbing Gristle-related release. But, as I discovered when visiting a club in Brighton on visiting friends in the late 90s, some stuff, I just struggle to connect with. And this is it. To add to my story, I attended an Optimo night in Glasgow in 2004 to see Whitehouse. It was a strange event, in that most were there for the downtempo dance, which was halted for three quarters of an hour while William Bennet and Philip Best cranked out the most punishing, ear-shredding set to the sheer horror of the majority, before smooth beats returned, to their relief. My experience was inverse to the majority. Whitehouse did not go down well: the end of their set did. As the relentless bouncing beats returned, I was happy to leave, as were my whistling, devastated ears.

‘One in the Future’ is the longest eleven minutes of nondescript sonic wallpaper I have had the pain to endure in over a decade. It’s the monotony that hurts. It’s soulless, tedious, and nothing happens. And this is a fair summary of the album as a whole. To my ear, to my mind, to my insides, it feels so devoid of… anything that I can connect to. The samples blare, the squelchy synths blip and bloop and pulsate over tedious beats and maybe I need different drugs or a different brain, but this is relentlessly tedious, monotonous and crushingly dull. Get me out of here!

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Celer – Perfectly Beneath Us

Posted: 5 June 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Field Records – 24th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s funny to reflect on how things evolve, and how one evolves as an individual. Ten years ago, I was pretty underwhelmed on my first encounter with Celer, commenting on Zigzag that ‘aside from the occasional ripple and swell, there are no overt peaks or troughs, there is no drama. In fact, very little happens.’

Over time – a lot of time, in truth – I’ve come to appreciate that things happening aren’t always the maker of a quality album. And when it comes to more ambiently-inclined works, there’s not a lot that’s supposed to happen.

Released on 24th May, like every other album this year, Perfectly Beneath Us was originally released way back on CD in 2012, and now, 12 years on, it’s getting a well-deserved vinyl release, with four tracks spanning roughly thirty-four minutes occupying an album.

Each side contains a longform sonic expanse and a shorter piece, approximately three minutes in duration, and everything is segued to bring a connected flow the work. I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of the formats or how nigglesome some may be. If you buy the vinyl, you’ll need to turn it over after about a quarter of an hour. It’s exercise at least, and that’s a positive as this certainly isn’t ruining music.

Just as I complained that nothing much happens on Zigzag, nothing much happens on Perfectly Beneath Us, either, only now I’m not complaining.

Since the inception of Celer In 2005, initially as a collaborative project2005 between Will Long and Danielle Baquet, until the passing of Baquet in 2009, since when, as the Celer bio outlines, ‘Long opted to keep their project going, and Celer has continued to grow as an expansive exploration of purest ambient.’ Purest ambient is indeed a fair description of Perfectly Beneath Us, and to report that I found myself nodding off at my keyboard on more than one occasion while trying to pen my critique of the album is proof positive of a mission accomplished. It isn’t that Perfectly Beneath Us is dull, or boring – as I may have surmised many years ago – it’s just the very essence of ambience. It’s mellow, it’s background, it’s soporific, and it’s supposed to be.

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Celer – In Light Of Blues

Posted: 30 August 2021 in Albums
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Room40 – RM4130 – 13th August 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

I’m still recovering from the last Celer release I covered – the four-disc Future Predictions, released only last summer. It wasn’t harsh or sonically challenging: it was just really, really long. This one, however, is rather shorter, comprising twelve tracks with a running time of just twenty-nine minutes.

It is, notably a departure. As the press notes detail, with In Light Of Blues, ‘[Will] Long pivots away from long-form works to create a series of vignettes that capture the essence of his aesthetics interests. The record condenses and refines his compositional methodologies forming each piece as an acoustic miniature speckled in hazy harmony and evocative tonality’.

As such, as much as In Light Of Blues is a departure, it is also very much a continuation of his previous work, while concentrating it down to shorter snippets – but with no loss of power or depth. Long’s comments on the reason for this departure are illuminating:

‘It was months ago, but it could have been weeks, days, or even hours since then. I stopped wanting to hear loops, I wanted to stop it. I added brass; trumpets, trombones, and more horns. I cut it out like words from a book, and sewed it back together. Burroughs. These movements are merely to stay alive, to stay moving.’

In citing [William] Burroughs, Long’s observation that ‘You wake up from a truck horn passing in the early morning hours on the nearby freeway, or from a dream that you can’t tell was a nightmare or a loving memory… Someone walks by on the street wearing the same perfume. I drew out each place, each scene, and put the story there. It might have been with you, or without you. All I know is that you were there somehow the whole time, even if you weren’t’ marks a striking parallel with some of Burroughs’ statements on the way the cut-up technique was an attempt to being art closer to life: “every time you walk down the street, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors… take a walk down a city street… you have seen half a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments”.

While the pieces on In Light Of Blues are composed from a montage of fragments, instead of jarring against one another and crossing over one another to replicate the blizzard of simultaneity that is life, they blur together to create a slow-creeping sonic mist. The details are obscured, the edges indistinct, the definition vague to almost absent. Some of the pieces are fragments in themselves: the second of the three ‘Melancholy Movement’ compositions is only fractionally over a minute long, and there are a number of pieces of similarly brief duration.

Time appears to be something of a leading preoccupation on In Light Of Blues, as titles including ‘Days Before the Change’, ‘In the Intimate Hours’, ‘After All Time’, and ‘Precious Past Hours’ indicate. The titles suggest a certain urgency, an anxiety, even, over the passing of time that’s not necessarily apparent in the music itself. But as is so often the case, with ambient / abstract musical forms, the music conveys only some aspects of the full meaning or intention, and beneath comparatively tranquil surfaces often lie more trouble currents, and there are numerous billows of darker, denser sound which rumble and stir, evoking brewing storms amidst the soft layers of the pieces here.

Perhaps this is the real pleasure – and perhaps also the purpose – of In Light Of Blues. It’s an album that can simply be allowed to drift along in the background, the darker clouds occasionally tugging the attention while, in the main, it may pass largely without the demand for focus. But closer attention yields greater rewards, in the sonic depths and subtle textures that reveal themselves through that engagement, and to seek the space beneath the surface, to explore its context and origins and consider what it may mean beyond the surface yields more still.

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Celer – Future Predictions

Posted: 13 January 2020 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

Two Acorns – 2A16 – DL release date: Out Now / CD release date: 6th March 2019

Celer’s Future Predictions is a vast and ambitious work: spanning four discs, it’s an ambient exploration on a truly grand scale. Each disc contains a single longform track, each running at around half an hour, with the shortest, ‘No Sleep in Medan’ clocking in at 27’30”, and the longest, ‘Nothing Will Change’ 42’36”.

According to the write-up, the compositions are made with ‘tape loops, from digital and acoustic instruments, field recordings and foley sounds’, and ‘with a focus on introspection and imagination, each piece begins with all layers playing, with minimal additional long-term structural development in order to maintain a state’. There’s a conceptual lineage here, if not an auditory one: Future Predictions is the follow-up to 2018’s Memory Repetitions which was based on memory and the interpretation of it over time. Future Predictions, we learn, ‘is instead based on the idea of future situations, and should be seen as a meditation on future events’.

While the various elements of tape loops and various instruments are indistinguishable, combining in their simultaneity to create soft, supple sonic washes, hovering drones interweaving interminably, the overall effect is incredibly immersive.

The first of the four, ‘Merita’ is light, drifting like mist over dewy expanses of grassland at sunrise, and while I initially find myself waiting for some progression, expecting some transitional shift, after a time the stasis becomes the end in itself.

‘No Sleep’ inches into darker territory, with deeper, rumbling low notes but after a few minutes this sense of difference dissipates in the drift of elongated notes that have no clear definition, no forward trajectory, no overt sense of movement, but instead hover and hang in the air for all time. ‘Quaraous’ brings new layers, new tones, new, shades, a shimmering light and swell of organ to the proceedings, and for aa time it again feels different, but again, that difference fades over the course of half an hour of sameness.

The effects of Future Predictions are cumulative. It’s true that on a purely practical level, few, if any, are likely to listen to all four discs or digital files in succession, although it’s in this context of continuous play that it works best. Admittedly, this is not music to listen to, but to allow to drift by. You don’t listen: you feel it and on a subconscious level as you drift, and you let life happen and continue as normal. I read and replied to texts and emails, while the sound swelled and hummed in eternal undulations. They didn’t transport me anywhere, they didn’t ‘do’ anything. And yet, inducing a certain sense of sedation, of slowness, of tranquillity, they achieved everything.

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Celer