Posts Tagged ‘Sound in Silence’

A New Line (Related) – A Quarterly Update On The Sadness

Posted: 30 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Sound in Silence – 5th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

As my final review of the year, what could be more fitting than a work, the title of which, suggests an element of reflection on the recent past. Businesses provide regular reports, people and musical ventures tend not to, with perhaps the notable exception of Throbbing Gristle, but then, they were an exception to more or less everything before or since. Their debut album proper, The Second Annual Report, which followed a brace of cassettes, The Best of Throbbing Gristle Volume I, and The Best of Throbbing Gristle Volume II, set new precedents in so many ways.

Arriving to the latest release from A New Line (Related) – the solo project of Andrew Johnson, who has previously released music as a member of bands such as Hood, The Remote Viewer, and Famous Boyfriend among others, one feels compelled to wonder ‘just how is The Sadness, and how has it been of late?

This is his third album, which we’re forewarned is an ‘immersive’ work, which ‘balances between minimal techno, dub house and ambient pop.’

‘Calapsis’ drifts in with low-key beats pulsing beneath delicate waves which ebb and flow subtly, gusts of compressed air which build to a hypnotic close. It’s not until the glitchy, disjointed groove of ‘3AM Worry Sessions’ arrives that we begin to get a sense of The Sadness. Stress and anxiety manifest in many ways, and while worry and panic may manifest differently their cousinly relationship It heaves, jittery unsettled and tense, conveying an uncomfortable restlessness.

The globular grumblings of ‘The Ballad of Billy Kee’ emerge from a rumbling undercurrent or mirk to glitch and twitch like a damaged electrical cable sputtering and sparking. Elsewhere, there’s a certain bounce to ‘Only Star Loop’ which gives it a levity, but the scratchy click of cymbals which mark out the percussive measures feels somehow erratic and the time signatures are apart from the bubbling synths and the distant-sounding, barely-audible vocal snippets, which give echoes of New Romanticism. Overall, the track has an elusive air of whispering paranoia.

In many ways, not a lot happens on A Quarterly Update On The Sadness, and the sparse and repetitive yet curiously dynamic title track is exemplary. It leaves you feeling strangely disconsolate, bereft, not only as if you’ve perhaps missed something, but that you’re missing something – not from the music, but from your own life. It seems, in conclusion, that The Sadness is thriving in its own, understated way.

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Ludvig Cimbrelius – Here

Posted: 21 December 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Sound In Silence – 5th December 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Ludvig Cimbrelius has been around for some considerable time now, and the label bio outlines how the Swedish musician – now based in Turkey – has, for over a decade, been producing music ranging from ambient and modern classical to deep electronic and minimal dub techno, under his own name and many different aliases such as Eternell, Purl, Illuvia, and others. His latest offering incorporates sound sources such as ‘calm acoustic piano, ethereal vocal spheres, atmospheric electric guitars and field recordings’

Despite containing only six tracks, Here has a running time of almost fifty minutes. These are expansive, contemplative works, and offer more than a hint of neoclassical gentility. Hearing ‘Left But Never Left’ is a wonderfully calming experience. It’s true, of course, that any individual’s response to anything musical or otherwise creative is entirely personal, but Cimbrelius transcends the layers of atmosphere between floating adrift and arriving in layers of mist and haze. The notes flow with space in between, and this space provides a lull in which to exhale, and to reflect. This piece, at just under four minutes in length, is just a prelude to the immersive soundscapes which follow.

‘When Warm Tears Fell from the Sky’ is a composition of the kind of ambience which evokes the soft wash of diluted watercolours spreading on paper to conjure, as if by some form of magic, a sky, a sea, fields, with just a few simple brush strokes, whereby the effect is greater than the input, at least to the eye. This is the sound of currents in the air, of mist, of cloud drifting, evaporating, reforming, changing shape as it moves through the sky.

The fourteen-minute ‘These Flames I Gently Let’ encapsulates the essence of the album in its entirety within its parameters. It begins with lilting, light-as-air piano and gradually melts into a soft swash which includes what sounds like rainfall and wordless vocalisations which slowly run into the broad flow of non-specific sound which slowly slips from being the focus of your attention into the background. It is, in this sense ambient in its purest form, falling into the background. ‘Lost in the Mists at Dawn’ is the soundtrack to the narrative vignette contained in the title: haunting, evocative, it conjures the scene in your imagination without actually saying anything, and its power lies within the depths of its wispy vagueness.

The execution of Here is magnificent. The tracks trickle into one another imperceptibly, creating a seamless sonic flow. The layers are interwoven so as to meld into a finely-textured gauze, and everything is so smooth, so soothing and soporific.

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worriedaboutsatan – Crystalline

Posted: 14 January 2020 in Albums
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Sound In Silence – 9th January 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Fifteen years on from initiating worriedaboutsatan, Gavin Miller resumes work under the moniker as a solo performer once more. During that time, there have been lengthy breaks, solo releases and side projects, and five albums along the way, all of which featured Thomas Ragsdale. As a duo, it was always apparent that each of them brought something very different to the table, and on paper, the differences probably just shouldn’t work, with Ragsdale’s more beat-centric style seemingly at odds with Miller’s introspective post-rock / ambient stylings. But work it did, and incredibly well. The sound evolved over time, too, from the stuttering microbeats that characterised Arrivals to the up-front booming dance grooves particularly prominent in their later live sets, worriedaboutsatan developed, but remained distinctive.

So what impact Ragsdale’s departure to focus on his solo endeavours?

Pleasingly, Crystalline still has that je ne sais quoi that’s uniquely worriedaboutsatan, despite the contrasts being less pronounced, as Miller pursues the more ambient direction that defined Revenant and Blank Tape. The eight pieces coalesce as a whole to create an album that’s mellow and subtle, with reverby guitar notes chiming out into soft washes of ambient synth. It is predominantly background in its positioning: Crystalline isn’t an album where anything leaps out and grabs the attention, there are no peaks or troughs, and the whole thing more or les drifts by on a certain level that registers low on the concentration meter. That’s not a criticism, but a personal observation on its function as a musical work: it supplements the mood and occupies a space in an understated fashion, and is something that can be played while you’re working or reading. By the same token, that doesn’t make it ‘forgettable’ or mean it isn’t worthy of attentive listening: Miller has constructed some magnificently layered compositions, and while the overall sensation emanates from broad washes of sound that could be described as impressionistic, there is considerable detail beneath the surface.

The forms are vague and vaporous, the individual instruments indistinct, but this changes on penultimate track, ‘Secretly’, where the guitar becomes clearer and more ‘guitary’, and judders as the echoes take over the notes, creating a doubling effect as the picked strings stop and stutter against a heartbeat pulse of a beat.

The album closes with the mournful drones of ‘Switching Off’: sparse, spaced out, blank in their connotations before a swell of overloaded feedback begins to rise in the loudest, most abrasive moment on the album, before it’s suddenly cut dead. Thank you, and good night.

The suddenness of this ending is unexpected, and breaks the suspension of time that the preceding half hour of amorphous sound punctuated by barely-there beats has created. It’s a jolt, and you’re back in the room.

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worriedaboutsatan – Crystalline

HIN – Warmer Weather EP

Posted: 27 June 2019 in Singles and EPs
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James Wells

And after weeks of torrential rain, temperatures so far below the seasonal average if feel more like a different season, we suddenly find ourselves not experiencing just warmer weather, but day one of a burning heatwave set to last for… two days.

Imbeciles may scoff about so-called ‘global warming’ because they fail to grasp the fact that in some places, like Britain, the melting of the ice caps doesn’t mean we can grow bananas, grapes and coffee beans in our window boxes, and that instead, tropical storms are going to batter us while the coastline shrinks beneath rising sea levels.

So, what do we know? Thanks to the press blurbage, we know that ‘HIN is the new ambient/electronic project of Jerome Alexander, best known as Message To Bears, along with his school friend Justin Lee Radford, also known as The Kids And The Cosmos’. We also know that the ‘Warmer Weather EP’ is HIN’s debut release.

The five songs on offer here are mellow to the max. The beats are so laid back they’re practically soporific, all the tones so soft-focus as to be tantamount to dissipating vapours in a clear blue sky on a hot summer’s day. Yes, this is definitely a hot summer’s day soundtrack. But it’s also completely smoothed out, depersonalised, chilled to the point of total blandness, the Mr Whippy of ice cream. What is there to say? Can I have sprinkles and a flake with that soft vanilla?

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HIN

Gavin Miller – Shimmer

Posted: 3 October 2018 in Albums
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Sound in Silence – 30th September 2018

Christopher Nosnibor

Collectively and individually, Gavin Miller and Thomas Ragsdale (worriedaboutsatan, Ghosting Season) have produced an impressive volume of work – although perhaps even more impressive than its quantity is the consistency of the quality. They’ve always been something of a yin/yang pairing, and the individual differences are integral to their collaborative works. So, while Ragsdale brings the beats and beefy bass, Miller is the man who contributes wistful soundscapes and delicate atmospherics. The fact they’ve released solo efforts within a few short weeks of one another not only highlights their productivity, but affords the opportunity to compare and contrast the similarities and differences of their musical approaches.

Shimmer comprises six tracks, simply titled parts one through six. The tones are soft, the textures deep. It begins with vaporous drones, soft-focused, broad in spectrum, providing a backdrop to delicately picked, reverby guitar and a hesitant bass, bringing hints of the instrumentation of Julee Cruise’s ‘Falling’.

Piano notes reverberate and organs trill and wheeze. There’s a lot of air and a lot of space: this is music which breathes, drifting, an organic ebb and flow providing the irregular patterns of ever-shifting form. The pieces don’t so much segue as melt into one another, while the individual instrumental sounds blur together, a gauzy halo surrounding each note which ultimately creates a sense of vaporousness.

With Shimmer, Miller trades in intangibles. That isn’t to say the pieces are without form or structure, but that the forms are ever-shifting and impossible to pin down, the structures possessed of an opacity which renders them indistinct. So while the successive passages are interesting in their own right, Miller doesn’t resort to repetition or motifs to hold them together, instead allowing them to flow freely. It’s the kind of ambience that fades in and out of the foreground of consciousness: as such, it’s not completely background, but it is ideal for after a mentally strenuous day at the office or equivalent.

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Gavin Miller - Shimmer