One of Moving Furniture Records’s ‘side labels’ is the series Eliane Tapes. The first six releases in this series were tapes with gorgeous ambient drones. The choice of tapes was evident because medium tape forms an essential ingredient in many of her compositions. But a lot happens in a lifetime, and as it turns out, cassettes have just about the worst carbon footprint of all possible media. So the choice was made (ed: being a fan of tape compression, I can only imagine it to be a hard choice) to no longer use the tape as a medium but the environmentally friendly CD. Turkish-based Elif Yalvaç has the honour of reopening the Eliane Tapes series on CD.
Like many ambient and drone artists, Elif is a big fan of Radigue, and for “Vection”, Radigue’s “L’Île Re-Sonante” formed the inspiration. And how inspiration works that’s different for everybody. “Vection” has five tracks, four shorter ones and one from 10 minutes. “L’Île Re-Sonante” is a single piece of almost an hour; for me, that is where the big difference between ambient and drone is. The pieces on this album are gorgeous, beautiful minimalist sculptures and fantastic ambience, but it’s not the massiveness of the piece that forms the inspiration. In a way, it’s the perfect example of how ambience and drones are interconnected but are entirely different.
Having written all of this, I will focus on this CD. The sounds Elif uses range from the digital territory to the use of guitar, which she also uses in an experimental rock setting under the name Diaries of Destruction. The balance of both the digital and analogue sources is spotless; A very well-produced album. There are two highlights for me: the opening track, “Telesto”, features rich variation and is a great composition. The closing 11-minute “Quaoar” is the longest but is also the closest to what drone music is about. In total, it is only 32 minutes in length, but those are 32 minutes of high-quality sounds from someone we will read of more often in the future.
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