resonant strata

first test of a live setup for an upcoming show

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 21:43:09 +0200

first test of a live setup for an upcoming show

Asher – Untitled Landscapes 1 & 2

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:59:39 +0200

Asher’s covers to “Untitled Landscapes 1 & 2” are programmatic. The bleak pictures that are drowning in dark metallic grey are a direct representation of the music that is mostly of monochromatic nature.Thick and beating oscillations slowly ebb and swell in lower registers, while the upper frequency is covered with a patina of soft noise.

A lot of times the tracks sound more like field-recordings from slowly breathing machines covered under layers of tape hiss and washes of reverb and room noise. Asher manages to create rooms, domes of sound – not as a texture, but as a reflection. As if the source is not present anymore; sound without subject, without purpose. This might be the reason his soundscapes are neither warm nor cold, since there’s no clear signifier left under these faint waves of noise. This also leads to the fact, that is is quite hard to make out a beginning or ending of a specific track. Although they are different in texture and timbre, there is no need for a distinction and the blend together just so easily.

If you compare Untitled Landscapes 1 to Untitled Landscapes 2, the main difference is not only to be found int the running length of the individual tracks (with the tracks of “Untitled Landscapes 2” being 20 minutes each), but also the timbre. The longer tracks are a little noisier, although there seems to be a lot more harmonic content buried under the noise and hiss than on Untitled Landscapes 1 with its shorter yet more monochromatic tracks. Both approaches supplement each other perfectly

Asher’s Untitled Landscapes keep, what they are promising: Opaque sonic landscapes stretching out like a moor – open, endless, sucking you in deeper and deeper.

Room40

My album Aether is available as a digital download via bandcamp....

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:35:10 +0200

My album Aether is available as a digital download via bandcamp. For anyone into drones, modular synth and stuff, this is your way to a happy start into the week

Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland – Ebony

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:31:07 +0200

To be honest, I wasn’t that much of a fan of Hype Williams – they always seemed a little too ironic, a little too eclectic. But there were always some details that appealed to me: the quirkiness of their synths, their displayed amateur approach to producing music for example-

Their recent album “Ebony”, released under their “real” names Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, ventures into similar territory. The production doesn’t differ that much from their old approach with their overdriven, lo-fi, home-recording aesthetic, that makes them appear strangely self-centered in their own sound universe full of detuned synths, cheap drum machines .

A lot of the tracks are just short bits and pieces; more like snippets and interludes on a mix-tapes interconnecting the longer tracks. They are in large parts responsible that the albums flows past in a synthesized haze; sounds drifting in and out, loops tumble into focus and disappear again shortly after.

The track titles feel like a play with the file-sharing discourse with only the first track featuring a title – although in brackets – and the rest just being name track XX. One of the highlights is Track 09 with its looped vocal sample saying “never look back” that turns into melancholic nostalgic drifting track that works in the opposite direction as the words repeated over and over again. When the piece suddenly drops into a Buffalo Girls kind of beat, the friction and play of nostalgia gets an interesting twist of sugar-coated pop and self-aware eclecticism.

Ebony leaves me strangely undecided. The self reference and lo-fi approach to pop and 80s beats and synths is really appealing, but the tongue in cheek attitude is a little too much for my taste at some points. Nevertheless i realized I came back to this record a lot more often than I expected. It seems something in this record must be rubbing me the right way then – although I can’t really put my finger to it.

Hyperdub

Radere – Good Evening, Ghosts

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:17:40 +0200

Good evening, Ghosts is a remix release. The EP starts off with what served as the foundation for the following remixes. A beautiful lo-fi recording that reminds of distant wind chimes or a guitar – it’s not really easy to tell, what it actually is, as i could also be something completely composed. Anyways, the piece is absolutely gorgeous. What follows are five remixes from Benoît Pioulard, Jannick Schou, Sun Hammer, Anduin and Radere himself. Each of them offering a slightly different approach to the ambient genre that is so popular these days.

While Jannick Schou is responsible for the more distortion driven and muffled bits of the original, Benoît Pioulard heavily relies on repetition. The looped field-recording feels like a skipping record adding a very melancholic direction to the original version. His tracks feels like having no real release for the built up tension, but constantly revolves around the same topic over and over again.

The Sun Hammer track feels very distant, very disconnected from the listener and the original recording, but in a good sense. By taking a step back, the piece becomes a lot more reflective of the source material zooming into details, setting sounds against each other and leaving a lot of room for the single events to breathe and resonate.

Anduin’s version is probably the most laid back work on this release. Deep synth pads fade in and out just so slightly that there are barely perceivable. With the field recording oscillating around the listener in the stereo the track has a moebius loop character that is just a little different each run. It’s interesting to hear that nearly all artists choose to work from the beginning sounds of the original loop, where one can hear the surface noise of a hand holding the field recording devices as if they wanted to especially highlight the tool itself and not the recording.

The final reworked version from Radere is a dense, distorted chunk drenched in distant reverbs stretching out to nearly 15 minutes. The high end frequencies are a little too overbearing for me to fully submerge into this, but the pace and progression is executed with the same sense for detail and care that is usually the case with Radere tracks. Just like all other releases on Futuresequence, Good Evening Ghosts is just beautiful – if only they were also available as a vinyl version …

Radere
Futuresequence

John Foxx & The Maths – The Shape of Things

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:13:36 +0200

If you are looking for futuristic elctronic music, rooted in the experimental pop approach of the early 80s, you don’t need to look any further than John Foxx of Ultravox fame. His latest album “The Shape of Things” together with Benge, as the John Foxx & the Maths is no exception to this. At first glance, this is glossy 80s synth pop all over. Lush pads, pulsating arpeggios and cold, minimal beats. But The Shape of Things is more than just a retro laden nostalgia trip. It is hard to put your finger on it, there are tiny cracks and fissure in the surface. The beats are a little too monotonous, the sounds a little too raw for yur average pop tracks. The way for example “Talk” stoically pulsates forward with a booming bassline and ultra minmal percussions make you crawl up the wall in a good way, since the tension is rising to nearly unbearable levels and finds no release. Tracks like “September Town” function the complete opposite way. A catchy melody with some some walking synth bass carries you into classic synth territories of early Human League and Ultravox accompanied with melancholic harmonized vocals. Small interlude-esque sound pieces break the flow with late 70s anaolg synth sound miniatures. It these opposites that are the strong point about “Shape of Things”. The way they undermine categorization of the album.

The album features two collaborations as last tracks. Neither the track with Matthew Dear with its reduced 4/4 bassdrum patterns nor the song with Tara Busch really anything new to the absoluztely amazing album and feel a little displaced in comparison to the other tracks. Anyways, this doesn’t change anything – Shape of Things is an absolute joy to listen to.

John Foox & The Maths
Metamatic

Anduin – Stolen Years

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:57:23 +0200

Transatlantic postal services suck. Especially when you eagerly wait for a package that is supposed to come. It is definitively not the first time that a package got lost in the mail for me, but, when it is something such as the Anduin release on SMTG, it does hurt more than if was just some random items ordered from amazon.

Anyways, luckily enough,there was at least the digital version of the release to keep me company. And a good company it is. At first I was expecting some synthesizer drone album of the variety that is quite popular these days. But a couple of minutes in, “Stolen Years” revealed that there was so much more to be discovered. Sure, there are your monochromatic layers of sound, actually pretty good ones too, but the record has its strong points beyond that. The way Anduin plays with rhythm is absolutely great. From tiny blips and clicks that flutter around to actual beats, the whole piece seems to be a quietly pulsating machine contracting and expanding to the ebb and flow of the music. Especially since the beats and percussions sometimes seemed to be made out of field recordings such as in “Dyadic Twenty Seven” they emphasize the organic feel of the tracks even further.

Above all that wanders a freely moving saxophone, sometimes just as a glimpse of sound in the background, sometimes as a solo instrument giving the track more direction and moving it more into the psych improv field, but without the murkiness and the fuzz of that genre. Sometimes those saxophone lines seem to venture off into cheesy mid 80s pop, where Rafferty meets Toto meets late Jean Michel Jarre. Nevertheless, the saxophone never takes up too much attention leaving enough room for the track to breath, so that in the end Stolen Years maintains to be a slowly gliding, ethereal piece of ambient music. A record that shouldn’t be missed.

Anduin
SMTG Limited

Keith Fullerton Whitman – Generators

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:39:00 +0200

Music by machines is a topic that is written onto the body of electronic music since its early beginnings (maybe the Theremin and Trautonium era left aside). Handing over some or all of the control to the machines is something that regularly resurfaces in the electronic music discourse. This of course is not only a question about machines, artificial intelligence or algorithmic approaches, but also a discussion about the role of the artist; or even more precisely a discussion about the subject as an author (or the author as a subject – depending on the point of view) – who is writing the piece? who is responsible? Where does creativity begin? What means purpose, what expression in an artistic discourse?

There is a long history of this discussion in modular synthesis with its large cabinets full of electronic synthesizer gizmos having only limited functionality by themselves, but when connected together forming an organic body of sound, where every bit is able to react to the other connected modules, to change each individual state and to also change the state of the machine as a total entity.

One of the people being very active in this research over the last couple of years, is Keith Fullerton Whitman. Especially his Generators series is a mind-bending document of this approach. Patching up his modular synthesizer in order to let it run autonomously is the core to this series. There are already a number of released recordings – all quite different in their results. With his Generators release on Editions Mego, he again patches up his Eurorack synth modules and let them just evolve into morphing synth textures.

The first piece is an homage to Eliane Radigue and starts off just as if she would sit at her Arp synthesizer. Long, metallic drones of beating waves build the foundation. Over the time repetitive arpeggios slowly move more and more into focus. What starts as muffled synth bleeps changes into high a energy high pitched note series that could easily be a Klaus Schulze pattern just to dissolve into fragmented synth events in the end.

The second track begins with subwoofer shattering triggers that intertwine with stuttering ultra high synths click and distant crackles. The track takes quite some time to evolve, circling again and again around the same clusters and bursts, but each time with different angles to finally blend into a introspective, glassy pattern that breaks up into random noise fragments.

What adds a nice layer to the pieces is that they are not recorded directly to disk or tape via line out, but mic’ed in the room. This does not only blend the sounds together a lot more organically, but also highlights the dynamics, transients and modal waves a lot more detailed making it it a unique single event that can’t be repeated at any other place.

The Generators series shows that the idea of machine music and music made by machines is far from over. The way the sounds interact with each other has an inner logic that does not particularly feel natural in a compositional kind of sense, but has a formal beauty and organic quality that is just astonishing.

Editions Mego
Keith Fullerton Whitman

thomasraukamp: ‘Aether’ is Nils Quak’s first album that was...

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:22:08 +0200

thomasraukamp:

‘Aether’ is Nils Quak’s first album that was produced completely on a modular eurorack synthesizer together with additional processing and fieldrecordings. It will be out on Somehow Recordings on April 10th.

Silencio – When I'm Gone

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 13:18:18 +0100

It is not clear if the project name silencio is meant as a demand or a description of a state that can never be achieved. Anyways, the French ambient project Silencio that mainly consists of Julien Demoulin and other accompanying musician ventures in a beautiful state between music and sound as a way to shape the perception of time and space.

“When I’m Gone” is an incredibly hushed and mellow album. The tracks are woven with field-recordings that just hoover above the threshold of perception making it hard to discern if sounds were outside the window or part of the record. It is remarkable that it is not even important, what the field-recordings are about – they are just there. And work differently from a lot of other tracks out there, which use field-recordings as an easy and cliche-laden way to add some sense of emotion to a track.

The swelling drones of strings and synth sounds never reach dark regions. They always float gently along leaving enough room for bass melodies that originate from synth and bass/guitars. This bass layers add a lot space and depth to the tracks creating a springtime sunday afternoon atmosphere. Although Silencio refers to its sound to be about absence, distance or memory, “When I’m Gone” doesn’t sound as dark as one might expect. Although being quite introspective, it has more of a calming dream-sequence with its repetitive guitar patterns, carefully placed synth chords and gentle, minimal percussions from pulsating drum machines that remind of Pan American at times – although less song orientated. Nevertheless at some points Silencio venture off just slightly into a similar post rockish area as Pan American, for example when “Taking Time” reaches its climax and opens up for an unexpected drum beat. The only time, when the feeling of the record seems to shift towards a more longing theme just to close with a warm and lulling piece that is carried by airport-esque e-piano motive – gorgeous.

three:four Records
Silencio

Black to Comm – Earth

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:40:48 +0100

Black to Comm always had this sort of shamanic tendency, where Marc Richter seemed to execute strange sonic rituals, only he was able to make sense of, but the latest record on DeStijl, takes this approach a little further. While Alphabet 1968 had an airy quality to it with its light textures and floating sound fragments, Earth feels a lot heavier and darker. Mourning vocals emanate from the mist of sounds that reminds of lost rites, while backwards field-recordings intensify the eeriness of the first track. It is a surprise that vocals seem to play a lot larger role than they used to be on earlier Black to Comm recordings. All five tracks have vocals to some extent. Most of the time they appear serve like an additional layer of texture mumbling along in the background, sometimes the are a little bit more in the foreground and comprehensible, but in both ways they add a sense of urge and yearning to the tracks that was not present in this intensity in Richter’s project.

Originally recorded as a score to the silent film “Earth” from Ho Tzu Nyen, the album has a morbid, hallucinogenic, feverish feeling that will haunt you and resonate long after the last song has been played.

De Stijl
Black to Comm

Franco Falsini – Cold Nose

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 08:05:56 +0100

Krautrock and New Age kind music is having a little renaissance in the last one or two years. Spectrum Spools, curated by Emeralds John Elliot, is one of those labels, which dives into these genres quite a bit and Franco Falsini’s “Cold Nose” perfectly falls into this 70s krautrock category.

Cold Nose consists of three tracks of introspective, psychedelic guitar work with lots of delays and arpeggiated pickings. The sound and texture remind loosely of Popol Vuh around the Aguirre era, though a little less stretched out and less glacial. Falsini adds a heavy psych note to the tracks with fuzzy guitar lines layered on top of his repetitive bed of notes. Although the track listing shows only three songs, each title seems to consist of a bunch of tracks fading into each other. This gives Cold Nose a sense of being loose sketches or improvisations, which seems to be a little off the Krautrock rules with its lengthy tracks, but works perfectly, since the mood and direction don’t really change that much. With just close to 30 minutes, the record could have been a bit longer for this kind of music to be fully immersive, but it is nevertheless a really enjoyable album.

Spectrum Spools

Peter Prautzsch – Schwere See

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:54:01 +0100

Peter Prautzsch’s “Schwere See” is heavy stuff. To call this ambient, would neither do the album nor the genre any justice. With early expeditions into the Arctic Sea as a thematic backdrop, the eleven tracks explore dark and desolate territories. Thick brooding drones hover dangerously in the background with muffled field recordings making their appearance here and there.

The spectrum of sounds used in Schwere See is immense. Besides the aforementioned drones and field-recordings, Schwere See has a couple of tracks that are accompanied with drums and percussions, which works absolutely amazing, because they add a lot of theatrical impact on the already heavy and haunted sounds. At some points the heaviness gets lifted a bit making way for airy, foggy synth or e-piano patterns as in “Auf Grund”, which has a hazy dream-state ambience. The great thing about “Schwere See” is, that it doesn’t dwell on one established style, but changes it appearance quite a lot during the album. From really dark and bass laden drones, to cello-esque patterns and gong pulsations, the album has a lot to offer and digest.

The list of renowned artist with Sasu Ripatti (Vladislav Delay), Marc Weiser (Rechenzentrum) and Masayoshi Fujita (El Fog), who contributed to this album, is impressive and adds nice touches to the sound. Especially the Drums from Marc Weiser on “Skagerrak” with their massive side-chaining of the droning textures add an interesting dimension to the track, transporting it more into late 90s post rock regions, though with lesser complex drum patterns.

Too bad Neo Ouija has switched to digital only releases, because this would be amazing as a vinyl version. Anyways – there is a limited CD-R version available at Peter Prautzsch’s bandcamp page. You shouldn’t hesitate to get this one.

Neo Ouija
Peter Prautzsch

Pascal Savy – Receding

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 08:16:15 +0100

It seems that Pascal Savy has found his melodic voice. While former releases were delicate and beautiful studies in ambient, fieldrecordings and drones, explicit tonal material was harder to find. This changes with his new release “Receding” that is available on Twisted Tree Line. “If Time Allows” opens up with minor piano chords, hidden behind thick clouds of reverb and static, while sonar-esque blips stumble lost through the mist. The second tracks picks up, where the last one ended. Some hazy static builds the foundation for small tonal spikes, e-piano sounds and fieldrecordings buried under layers of reverb and delay.

Receding, the third track of the album, has some sounds that resemble desert-rock guitar twangs, which work perfectly for the glitchy skitters that seem to move like fluid through the stereo field. Together with glassy bell sounds and distant sine bleeps this track offers an enormous amount of depth and detail.

The FM piano splashes of the last track are delay drenched left-overs of heavy monome MLR abuse. Stuttering away like some old Shuttle 358 track, it has an introspect quality that it absolutely soozing.

Compared to the other, already amazing pieces of Pascal Savy’s music, “Receding” – as an album – is a great leap foreward for Savy in finding his voices and articulating it more precisely.

Twisted Tree Line
Pascal Savy

ZBEEN – K-Frame

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 08:14:32 +0100

Zbeen is the project of Ennio Mazzon and Gianluca Favaron and K-frame their first work together. Described as vectors to define space, K-Frame is a densely populated record that lives on the experimental side of electronic music.

K-frame is like sitting in at the middle of an electro magnetic field. Electrically buzzing signals move from left to right, intertwine with needle sharp high frequency tones and narrow field recordings. As much as it is not possible to focus on one element directly, the tension grows and the impression of swarms of electricity set into acoustic motion grows. This sounds like a messy version of Raster Noton or Ritornell releases. Messy not in a bad sense, but because Zbeen does not have the clinical strictness of the former mentioned. What they share is the way how they amplify structure.T he individual pieces have a nearly microscopic focus on detail, which show the fuzziness, the unschärfe of the elements. While Alva Noto and the likes rely on a very structured grid, with Zbeen sound seems to move rather by association; Permuting permanently, expanding at the seam and contracting more fluidly. At some points this reminds of early electronic forays of the Forbidden Planet variety, but with a strong computer based leaning. I’d love to hear this in 5.1 with all those rapidly moving sounds transmutating in the room around me. Just as with all Ripples Recordings releases, this is really good stuff and shouldn’t be missed out.

Ripples Recordings

My contribution to this weeks junto project

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 14:36:43 +0100

My contribution to this weeks junto project

A Setting Sun – December / Sun Hammer – A Dream in Blood

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 06:34:30 +0100

Jay Bodley seems to be a busy guy. With “A Setting Sun – December”” and “Sun Hammer – A Dream in Blood”, he released two albums within just a couple of months. While both linger somewhere between drone and ambient, the individual albums approach the genre slightly different.

December starts of intesne and brutal. After some distant flickers and hints of feedback, “Livonia” the first track of “December” floors you with a wall of distortion and high frequency buzzing drones . The following part with its muffled shifting waves and picturesque synth dribbles sound like a soothing lullaby to a lucid afternoon snooze in contrast to the heavy weight beginning. Compared to the first one, the other five tracks of “December” are a little more hushed. Sometimes they venture off into more dense distorted territories, sometimes they drone and pulsate along peacefully – “December” might not be adding anything particularly new to the modern ambient genre, but it doesn’t need to. Moving gently, the tracks are low-key enough to be running in the background (in the best meaning of the idea of ambient music) and they have enough detail to keep you focused on the sounds. This is great material to doze off to with its textures drifting in and out of focus – hovering in half a sleep, daydreaming states.

“A Dream in Blood” is a lot more pastoral and melancholic in tone. The distortion is pushed into the background, while woolly drones spread out as large, opaque landscapes. Bodley does a great job of transforming one state of sound to another; the tracks never finished, where they started. The sounds are always in a state of permanent flux. High airy drones slowly morph into warming bass rumbling textures that drown in cavernous reverbs. While this may not be a totally new concept, Bodley does a pretty good job at transforming the different plateaux of sound.

The only exception from this dark, introspective approach is “Concerning the Change of Address of S. Akalin” with its flickering, sizzling noises that seem to stutter nearly randomly through the stereo-field before they sink into the moist bed of large reverbs. Here Bodley returns to the aesthetic of his A Setting Sun material and ventures into more dozing teeritories.

Bodley – as A Setting Sun as well as under his Sun Hammer disguise crafts some serious ambient/drone pieces. While A Dream in Blood seems to weight a little more in terms of emotional heaviness and underlying melancholy, December is no less a great sounding piece, that just moves along a little quieter, mellower.

Moodgadget
Futuresequence

Some experiments with feedback, a contact mic and my modular...

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 20:24:10 +0100

Some experiments with feedback, a contact mic and my modular synthesizer

Dustin Wong – Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:26:06 +0100

2011 has seen a great popularity of looper based guitar and synth improv artists. The overall prominent Mark McGuire or the psychedelic freak-outs of Expo70 are just the tip of the iceberg. Together with the regained attention for redundant release formats such as tapes, it seems there is a vast of people sitting at home with their guitars and their Porta Studios and a handful of pedals layering arpeggio over arpeggio.

Dustin Wong could be easily brushed off as one of those kids, who fits in perfectly into this trend. Fuzzy guitar lines are stacked over each other, layers of arpeggios add their fractal feeling to the mix, while the delays pulse through the dense mist of sound. Regarding this approach, I have heard this a million times and to be honest, during the first session, I couldn’t make out much that really grabbed my attention. Although there was something that didn’t blend that well with the formula, but I wasn’t able to put my finger on it. It appeared to me during later listening session, what it exactly was. Dustin Wong seems to have a slightly different way of working with his effects. The way the changes in the delay lines interrupt the flow or how dry the recordings sound at the beginning of the track have a rawness that usually is not apparent in this genre.

This goes really well with Wong’s idea of rhythm. Where usually 16th/8th note patterns set the pace for your average guitar looper improv sets, Wong often settle for something a little more subtle – although this doesn’t mean he won’t fall into that rhythm as well. But this tiny difference is already enough to change the perception of the tracks. And it is enough to open a different chapter in terms of looper based guitar works.

“Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads” is a solid and lot of the time rewarding and entertaining guitar loop improv album. It still ventures enough in known waters to not upset the people, who are looking for a specific aesthetic associated with this genre, but has enough edges and new notions to not repeat the same trite ideas over and over again. This is definitively a keeper, which keeps growing with each session.

Thrill Jockey

Oren Ambarchi – Audience of One

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:28:01 +0100

Oren Ambarchi’s entry at Discogs lists 32 albums. The majority of them explore the ideas of drone, minimalistic guitar and bass sounds. His latest release “Audience of One” goes a different route. Compared with the usual hovering single notes stretched out on a dark surface, this album feels like a foray into more song oriented experiments.

“Salt” – the starter of “Audience of One” is a bitter-sweet duo-harmonic vocal track with sparse piano accompaniment and distant string sounds. This was so different, from what I was expecting that I needed to double check, if I really was listening to Oren Ambarchi. And although this is a great and moving listen, the harmonization of the vocals could be a little more elaborated. There is nothing wrong with them; the melody and the progression are both beautiful, but it feels that they are not fully exploring the possibilities that seem to be buried somewhere in this piece. This is probably the weakest track of the album.

“Knots”, a 32 minute long recording, is the center piece of “Audience of One”. Starting off with a tuplet driven jazz cymbal, airy feedback textures and the Ambarchi trademark bass sound with its muffled thump, it develops more and more into a noisy clash of sound, before it looses itself into washes of distortion and off-kilter drum patterns. This tour de force ends up in faint feedbacks, distorted spring reverb bass smacks that have a strange rubbery quality. This track is probably closest to the material, one is used to hear from Ambarchi, but still offers a lot of new approaches, ideas and perspectives to fill whole albums with it.

“Passage” opens with lonely piano chords and a high frequency field-recording that sounds like scratchy contact microphones or people walking in the snow. The track stays in this very hushed state with its distant voices shimmering in the background, airy Hammond organ drones and Eyvind Kang’s violin flickering like a far away beacon in this mist. Especially after the throbbing end of “Knots” this has a meditative, lucid quality that hovers on the edge of mid 80s new age records, before it seamlessly fades into the last piece of the album.

“Fractured Mirror” is an adaption of the 1978 hard rock piece by Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley. Together with Natasha Rose, Ambarchi turns this into a meandering Takoma school meditation. The quietly pulsing drum computer does sound a little too cheesy at the beginning but does the job quite well and ties the overlapping guitar lines together. Although the track is really close to the original, it is amazing to see how Ambarchi and Natasha Rose unveil the depths of this “simple” hard rock song that sounds so straight forward on a first and quick listen.

The various directions “Audience of One” takes and the slight differences from the regular Oren Ambarchi releases, makes this album a great listen. The combination of sounding catchy – even poppy at times – but yet still manage to keep an “experimental edge” is an interesting and rewarding approach.

Touch
Oren Ambarchi