A whole batch of releases was sent to us from the 'No Part Of It'-label from Arvo Zylo. Don't expect to find everything being reviewed at once. It's just too much for that, and it would make me slack it, which I refuse. After these two releases, there are still more releases where these came from. So have you subscribed to the Vital Weekly mailing already?
The first one of this week is "Aethereal" by Leslie Keffer. Two weeks ago, Frans reviewed another album by Leslie, "Perceive" (Vital Weekly 1369). In that review, he mentioned the release having four extra tracks, which could have been a separate release. Guess what ... Supporting Leslie and buying one of the albums will give you 'the other album' as a free download. So, these tracks have already been reviewed, but I'll get into them a bit deeper.
Where "Perceive" has some layering of rhythms or 'sonic recurrences', "Aethereal" doesn't have any. The four tracks - sadly only 40 minutes - of music is a crossover between ambient and drone. You can play them over and over as they do precisely what proper ambient should do: They enrich the atmosphere of your immediate environment. The origin of the sounds is mostly Leslie's voice, and I mean... Wow. You can recognise a voice as such only 30 minutes into the CD ("Mourning"). But also, the 'cello' is her voice. And... And... As is written in the promo sheet: "Keffer can mimic brass, wind, and strings with the manipulation of her voice in ways that are unseen elsewhere in the genre of ambient/experimental music."
Another fragment from the promo sheet is this: "The result is challenging and innovative ambient music that is raw and down to earth, but also graceful and compelling" that's a good promo sheet because, as your humble reviewer, I have nothing to add.
Comments
Post a Comment