Nocturnal Rainbow Recordings – 4th October 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
Where does the time go? It’s a question one hears people ask often, and I often ask myself the same. Time, it seems, evaporates when you’re busy simply existing, keeping going from one day to the next, working, paying bills, shopping, eating, sleeping. All the things you want to do, but simply never get around to, for one reason or another.
Where does the time go? All too often, I’ll receive an album well in advance of release, and, because of life, and an endless inflow of upcoming releases and other diversions and distractions, I will take a long breath of relief on calculating that I have ages, weeks, before the release date, to listen, process, and digest the work, to write and refine my review, and still be ahead of time. The next thing I know, I’ve reordered my review schedule numerous times, perhaps drafted a few preliminary notes, and the album’s been out for almost a month.
It was only a little over six months ago that I covered Slavin’s seventeenth album, Oolong: Ambient Works.
New Dawns, we’re told ‘exemplifies Slavin’s nonconformity, commitment and expansion to his cultural roots of exploratory music, through early clicks and cuts electronica and instrumental ambient, highlighting an immediacy and necessity for musical independence, through which he hopes to reach attentive new audiences… The album is more than a collection of tracks. a cohesive blending of diverse influences and sounds into a unified experience. A beginning of a journey. As with his previous projects, New Dawns invites listeners to immerse in a unique and tropic sonic world, where the boundaries between acoustic traditional instruments, post leftfield electronica, east and west, are blurred.’
New Dawns comprises sixteen tracks, titled ‘Dawn 1’ to ‘Dawn 16’, each representing, I suppose a new dawn. Each composition is distinctive, and distinct: there is separation, rather than segue, and this very much determines how this feels as an album – in that it feels like an album rather than a single composition sliced into tracks. And as such, there is a sense that each piece, appropriately, starts afresh. And while the overall experience is mellow and broadly ambient, there are solid features which mark the territory, and actual, distinct instruments, too, which punctuate, and, indeed, provide form and structure to the wispy ambient soundscapes: strolling, jazzy double bass, haunting, twangy guitars, piano, irregular beats, and splashing cymbals all feature… to say they feature prominently may be something of an overstatement, but their presence is clear, and in context, powerful.
Just as the sun rises in the east, so the twang and drone of sitars colour some of Slavin’s dawns, and across the span of the sixteen pieces, the sense of mood changes every bit as the sense of geography. Oftentimes, the dawning is gradual, a slow emerging of gentle light, but then, for example, the more percussive ‘dawn 7’ arrives abruptly and unexpectedly, and simultaneously brings with it more overtly electronic vibes which bring together Krautrock and minimal techno. ‘dawn 8’ brings swaggering avant-jazz wrapped in a cloak of prog rock leanings, shrouded in a murky fog of obscurity. ‘dawn 11’ has the kind of murky robotic minimalism of late 70s industrial, hinting at the point where Chris and Cosey would go on to spawn trance.
Its total running time may be under seventy minutes, but New Dawns is an immersive work, and I find myself drawn deeper into the details as it progresses. And those details are abundant. There’s simply too much going on for this to be considered a truly ‘background’ work: zone out for a second, and something else will prod its way to the fore, nagging and needling for attention, before sinking below the surface, to be replaced by something else. Having found myself drawn into the scrapes and drones, the subtle – and not to subtle – details, the album slips by, and so does an hour and a bit. And that, I come to realise, is where the time goes.
AA
Aural Aggravation 