6 posts tagged “ambient”

Not sparse enough to be ambient, too many live instruments for techno, too loopy for post rock, not loud enough to be shoegazer/dreampop...where exactly does Seefeel fit?

"Through You," from their first full-length, Quique, rides all of these genre lines pretty closely. There's plenty of guitar here, though it's all blurred and smeared and pushed way back in the mix, and it's pretty definitively non-rock guitar. There's a percussive element that could either be a heavily processed drum machine or drummer in a distant room. It builds slowly and steadily, but doesn't end much louder or more forceful than it began.

It's easy to see the lines of influence in retrospect, but sort of hard to see how they all wound up together. From the minimalism and pattern layering of 20th Century composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, to the insistent post-techno ryhthms of early Aphex Twin and, to the rich textures of everyone from Brian Eno to Kevin Shields, Seefeel was sort of a summation of a certain line of progress in the hitory of recorded music, where the focus was on feel, atmosphere, and tone rather than harmony, melody and rhythm. You can hear their own influence echoing today, rippling outward from the experimental territory they occupied, into deeper abstraction, and into more meditative rock/pop areas.

I think is the first time I've repeated an artist, so far. I'm trying to avoid that, although exceptions will be made.

The new Dntel album, Dumb Luck, has finally arrived! Jimmy Tamborello, the brains behind this particular operation, has had several full length releases and collaborations since the last Dntel album, venturing into different musical territories with each one. But it should come as no surprise that Dumb Luck picks up where Life Is Full Of Possibilities left off, with sweetly melodic acoustic instruments sharing space with synths that range from lush washes to stuttered blips. And of course, guests galore. Mia Doi Todd returns as a guest vocalist on "Rock My Boat", and everyone from Andrew Broder (Fog) to Jenny Lewis (Rilo Kiley) pitches in elsewhere.

To A Fault finds Ed Droste, of recent indie folk phenoms Grizzly Bear, joining Tamborello for a slow burning tune that picks up the detritus of the title track and layers it over a gentle acoustic pulse, gradually building to a tense and dramatic climax before falling apart again. The whole thing is hazy and dreamlike, with indistinct vocals cascading around the edges.

Ah, those experimental electronic musicians, and their disdain for track titles. Makes it hard for us music bloggers sometimes.

While there is no name to distinguish this track from the other 10 on the fifth Oval album, Ovalprocess, the surprisingly melodic structure does enough to set it apart. Your average Oval track is a far sparser affair than this somewhat stately piece, though the skipping samples and digital errors that are a trademark are still front and center. Most of the minimal electronic music I've posted recently makes some concession to accessibility and even, in some strange way, danceability. Mokira may have ventured of into abstract, arrythmic lands on later albums, but Markus Popp has been mining that territory since day one. Working with a mixture of custom built software and sound material compiled from scratched CD-Rs, Popp's music is, as the title of this album suggests, a result of variations in a well-defined process. One wonders if the clicks and cuts genre of electronic minimalism, or the digitally damaged electro-acoustic work of Fennesz and others, would have evolved the way they did without Popp and company's early albums laying much of the groundwork. Some would place a large amount of credit for the recent prominence of the glitch aesthetic at his feet.

Apart from releasing records as Pole, Stefan Betke also runs one of the definitive minimalist electronic labels, ~Scape, releasing records by Safety Scissors, Deadbeat, Burnt Friedmann, and others. But today, we are concerned with Jan Jelinek's first ~Scape release, Loop Finding Jazz Records.

Jelinek is a prolific producer working under his name and the pseudonym Farben (and occasionally as Gramm). Loop Finding Jazz Records is the first record he released under his real name, and its title is an apt description of its contents. The warm, meditative tones of these 8 tracks were created using a technique often referred to as "miscrosound," by sampling and manipulating fragments of old jazz LPs, stretching, layering and stuttering sub-second pulses of sound into new shapes. The result is a vaguely jazzy, deeply dubby, and cerebral approach to sampling. It's at once thoroughly modern and fondly nostalgic, using the tools of today to re-craft the sounds of yesterday.

Following up his full-album dismemberment of John Vanderslice's Cellar Door, comes Scott Solters remixes for Pixel Revolt. This is a full-album reworking that basically ignores the original vocals and takes an ambient dub approach to all 14 tracks from the indie rock album. It's rough and dirty, and scratchy around the edges like the first few Pole albums were, with plenty of tape echo and analog filtering. Solter has successfully transplanted Vanderslice's singer-songwriter sty;e into the realm of the Dead Texan and Brian Eno.

The entire remix collection is online in high bitrate .mp3 and uncompressed .aiff formats.

Covers can be done so many ways. There's the "faithful to the original" version, which is almost always the most boring approach. There's the "make it your own" approach, which is often nice. There's the "forcefully reclaiming/dramatically reinterpreting" path, also usually a good choice, if you can pull it off.

Austria's Christian Fennesz takes the last path here, and ends up with a charred and smoking, yet still strangely beautiful, version of the Beach Boys classic. His heavily processed guitar textures mimic the harmonic progression of the original, and somehow capture the mood without referencing the melody even once. In fact, there's very little that could be called melodic poking through the haze of granular synthesis and DSP. Rumor has it that he also created a version with the acapella vocal track (from the Pet Sounds Sessions box set, no doubt) dubbed on top, that was never released. You could probably recreate it at home yourself, if you had the proper source material. I've tried ti, and I have a feeling it would take a tiny bit of editing to get the timing right, but if you can focus in on those chord changes and fit it just right, something magical might happen.

(From the Plays single, which also contains a cover of "Paint It Black").