6 december 2007
New reviews from Finland by -Jiituomas, Kuolleen Musiikin Yhdistys.
Ships On Fire - The sleeper must awaken
The Sleeper Must Awaken is full of basically well made ambient that does not leave a strong impression.
It is a very even layer where nothing much happens, Its tone is basically warm, though a bit clinical,
and the album is quite nice as background music. There is some variance, but it's not obvious,
and easily ignored if one doesn't concentrate on looking for it. An exception to this is Glimpses of Silver,
a fine track that uses far more varied themes (though it, too, is still quite minimalist).
The music of Ships on Fire is not at all bad ambient, but I can straight away say that for
example Moljebka Pvlse has made several albums' worth of similar, yet far superior soundscapes.
On the other hand, as a free album, the price-to-quality level is quite high here.
I therefore recommend at least a look at Glimpses of Silver, if you happen to
like minimalist ambient at all.
Sigmud - Music from outer space
The Argentinian Sigmud (Julian Peralta) presents this time a more experimentalist side.
Music from Outer Space is a collection of different sorts of experimental tracks, according
to the artists a soundtrack to his internal movie. The sound-range is highly uniform,
but style and type of composition very diverse. At one point, it's all slow electro, at
another it's retro-ambient, and so on. The elements are beautiful in themselves, and the
artist clearly knows what he is doing, but the result just isn't that charming. The feel
of it all is somehow very abstract and remote. And at some points there are simply weird
moves, such as the "Jean-Michel Jarre on drugs" -sounding Sounds of the Moon. The Imagination Factory,
which spans the last five tracks of the album, is of a very different quality than the parts preceding it.
It is a fine, well-developing composition that has a very cold feel to it (this time in a good sense).
On it the lack of common thread, so annoying in the first 11 tracks, has been turned into a benefit.
It too is quite irritating, but in a different, interesting way. It also, to put it cruelly,
show how much better the whole album could have been, if it had been merged into a solid whole.
Friend of chaotic laptop stuff may enjoy this, but for others the material is probably too
diverse and too dissonant.
Buben - Lever
Vladislav Buben, from Belarus, creates experimental music under several different project names.
Lever contains mostly ambient of the more ordinary, non-dark kind, but on it is also things like
light radio noise and many Pan Sonic-like parts. Its soundscape is quite dissonant,
but at all times very beautiful. The production quality is excellent, both giving all the shades of
the music a chance to shine and making them feel strangely warm. This latter thing is a very important
part of the whole, because without it, many of the elements Buben has used would remain very clinical.
There are many tracks on Lever that fall into the category of "very interesting", but aren't
anything more than that. Yet there are gems between them, especially Space Trackers, and those
meld even the less hot stuff into a great whole. Buben is quite easy to listen to, yet stays
interesting without problems. So I can easily recommend the (completely free) downloadingof this album.
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