Remember when Stephen Fruitman used to contribute his thoughftul and incisively-worded reviews to these pages? Well, we do... and we miss him. Here is a conglomeration of all his reviews in one convenient repository... Please allow time for this page to load... lotsa good stuff! Alog: Red Shift Swing & Various Artists: Love Comes Over the Mountains   (Rune Grammofon) Alog is a brand-new duo hearkening from Norway, acknowledged home of ever-interesting experiments in ambience. Espen Sommer Eide, who also trades under the name Phonophani, comprises one half of this band, whose sound is characterized by a mixture of improvised acoustic and electronic sounds which are thereafter manipulated every which way imaginable. The opening cut of Alog's debut CD Red Shift Swing starts up like a take on Tortoise's "Djed", but as the cuts continue to roll by, influences extending far beyond post-rock (including techno, ambient and Reichian minimalism) make themselves manifest. Not the least, this reviewer detects the strong influence of the Sommer Eide aesthetic - the Phonophani sound from his first solo release, with its loops and eerie, echoey and yet somehow childlike innocence, becoming more and more prevelant as the disc progresses. A thoughtful, surprising CD - some harsh turns now and again, but generally a low-key, subtle and convincing journey. Rune Grammofon (happily continuing its tradition of housing its music in brilliantly-designed digipaks courtesy of Kim Hiorthøy) have also just released a compilation of new Norwegian electronics, all cuts exclusive to this recording. While Love Comes Over the Mountains includes numerous yeoman efforts by the likes of Information, Phonophani, and Deathprod, plus a generative, one-time-only piece by Arne Nordheim and a live collaboration between Biosphere and Deathprod recorded at Oslo Cathedral (recycling many of the sounds they produced for Rune Grammofon's brilliant Nordheim Transformed remix project), this lengthy CD is an otherwise rather plodding affair. However, it does feature the creme of Norwegian electronics experimentalists, so anyone wanting to keep abreast of what's happening in the studios scattered along the fjords at the end of the millennium can hardly afford to miss this release. A Produce/M Griffin: Altara (Hypnos) Apparently, A Produce and M. Griffin have never met face to face. As their respective previous solo albums prove, both are highly-skilled, idiosyncratic ambienteers whom, I assume, share a mutual admiration for each other's work. This eventually led to an exchange of DAT tapes back and forth between Los Angeles and Portland, as the artists meticulously sculpted a new world of sound neither had visited before. My previous exposure to A Produce leads me to characterize him as a composer of the dreamier sort, while Griffin has steadfastly inhabited darker regions. Here, they encounter one another in some sonic limbo located in the place where light meets dark. Though each of the five pieces dovetail nicely into one another, there is something particulary engaging about the final, thirty-six minute drone, "You Send Me the Message", vaguely reminiscent of A Produce's "A Smooth Surface (Extended)" but now roughened up slightly and submerged in inkier depths. Drift music in the murkiest of waters, this collaboration is still a triumph of clarity of vision and purpose and as such, one of the best of the year. Artemiy Artemiev: Mysteries of Sound (Elektroshock) Mysteries of Sound is Artemiy Artemiev's fifth and latest collection of eletronic compositions issued on his own, Moscow-based label. Previous CDs like The Warning, Cold and Point of Intersection have all shown him to be an electronic composer of the highest water, whose talents have followed a constant upward curve in their evolution. However, last year's Five Mystery Tales of Asia, the result of his travels in Mongolia, China and Japan and incorporating sounds from these cultures, indicated how far he has progressed since his debut in 1993 - the relative melodiousness of his earlier works now becoming invested with something heavier, more elusive. This trend continues with his latest release, Mysteries of Sound. While this album could easily be slotted into the "dark ambient" genre, its subtle shifts of mood locate it far beyond a simple genre piece. The four long tracks seem to have subsumed the Asian influence while at the same time never reneging it. The opening Pictures of I. Bosch & P. Breugel is a sublime aural landscape shot through with dark, shifting undercurrents, a mirror held up to the work of the artists to whom the title refers; playful yet ominous. While one would assume that, given our history, a track with the title Cataclysms of the XX Century" would be the most cacaphonous piece on the album, it is actually the half-hour long second track, Mysticism of Sound, Part #1, which roars and groans with the clash of swords and noise of upheaval. Cataclysms... is a collage-like documentary exploiting reverb effects and perhaps indeed telling the story of our sorry century; it reaches its resolution after a quarter of an hour with a quiet, meditative mantra, with a whimper or a sigh, not a bang. Finally, the second installment of the title track allows the Asian influence of Five Mystery Tales... to once again surface, this time dotted with percussive elements and electronic embellishments. Artemiy Artemiev has proven once again that he is an exciting and innovative composer who deserves much more exposure in the West. Elektroshock CDs are available online through www.gamma-shop.com Edward Artemiev: Solaris. The Mirror. Stalker (Elektroshock) Edward Artemiev is a legendary name in the world of experimental electroacoustics. One of its true pioneers, he was academically schooled in Moscow and then introduced to synthesizers in the form of prototypes constructed by mathematician and engineer Yevgeniy Murzin in 1960. Artemiev quickly mastered the medium and became one of the most original soundscape composers around - as he still is today. In the West, his name will always be associated with his trailblazing soundtrack work for three of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's films: Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979). Elektroshock Records in Moscow (run by his son, electronic composer Artemiy) have now released a 76-minute compilation of the finest moments from these three soundtracks. Austerely packaged in a form befitting the visual world of Tarkovsky, this CD is the ultimate collection of these suggestive works, which seem not to have aged at all over the years. Tracks from the trilogy are interwoven to fine effect, creating a suite of unsurpassed imaginative force. These scores may just be the finest example of film soundtracking ever committed to disc, and the compilation is a fitting tribute to them, creating something new by combining the tracks instead of slavishly releasing them in their entirety on separate discs. Finally, the record closes with Dedication to Andrei Tarkovskiy, composed by Artemiev in 1989 in honour of his friend and collaborator, who died in Paris in 1986, aged 54. Koji Asano: Preparing for April (Solstice) A beguiling and suggestively titled disc by Koji Asano, born in Japan, residing in Barcelona and the author of a baker´s dozen of CDs on his own label. Six unnamed tracks amounting to 67 minutes of Asano soloing on acoustic piano. "Treated" (but certainly not in the Harold Budd sense of solo piano) insofar as it has recorded in mono, the result is compressed and tinny, as if the notes were being played in a neighbouring apartment, drifting in through a window thrown open to enjoy the early spring air. At times melodiousness creeps toward dissonance, but never quite tips over the edge; at others he sounds like a child rehearsing rather challenging lessons. The stop/start hesitancy of the 27-minute long final track may grate on listeners after a while, but that still leaves forty minutes of enchanting and intriguingly nostalgic music. Solstice has its own website. Gavin Bryars: The North Shore (Materiali Sonori) The name of Gavin Bryars is often associated with high-concept minimalistic works like Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet or The Sinking of the Titanic; I've even seen them pop up on All-Time Greatest Ambient lists compiled here. And rightly so. But the English composer also scribes less grandiose pieces as well, and three of them are now available on a wonderful little album released by Materiali Sonori in Italy. The North Shore is an evocation of the coastline at Whitby in North Yorkshire, where Bryars spent his childhood summers, displaying (ambiently speaking) as much evocative power of "real" landscapes as Eno's Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960. A fine version of this already exists on A Man in a Room, Gambling, but here Bryars has rearranged it for cello and piano and the result is stunning. The players are members of the tiny ensemble Harmonia, and while only two of them appear on The North Shore, pianist Alessandra Garosi and cellist Damiano Puliti are joined by remaining member Orio Odori on clarinet for Intermezzo, commissioned directly from Bryars by Harmonia. Finally, the cellist withdraws and Odori and Garosi approach Allegrasco (also previously available, on ECM's After the Requiem and with a larger ensemble including violinist Alexander Balanescu and guitarist Bill Frisell) as a duet featuring luscious, fluid clarinet lines. Lyrical and melancholic, the three pieces provide an excellent showcase for Harmonia, who perform throughout with consummate musicianship and admirable restraint. A brief 42 minutes in length, it is still perhaps the finest chamber music release of the year. Bucolic: Dzyan Blood (BSI) Post-industrial dub executed according to Plan Nine from outer space. A bizarre mix of garish, cartoony science-fiction dashes of colours and the grays and browns of rusting, earthbound machinery disintegrating before our very ears, stretched and twisted by some very original ambient dub sensibilities. Apparently built up around unreleased jams from the San Francisco underground, Bucolic's first CD release is dub as nightmare, a satellite photograph of the global village's desperate millennial party taken from some malfunctioning space station. Hovering uneasily above us on a shifting but relentless cloud of beats, it swerves through funky jams, noise collages, late-night radio hosts, odd African rites, and calls to prayer from the last minaret left standing in Kosovo. Totally unexpected and genre defying. The future of dub? Only if the future takes place after the final big meltdown, fusing everything into grotesque, writhing shapes. Jonathan Coleclough: Windlass (Korm Plastics Introductory Paperback) His second solo effort after the limited release Cake, Jonathan Coleclough's Windlass is the finest ambient I've heard in ages. A low, quiet drone sets the tone and is joined by a higher, more distant one. Extremely subtle shifts in texture occur - now the drone seems to be generated by a pipe organ, and the accompanying static hiss soon metamorphoses into field recordings of chirping birds. Things get even quieter about one-third of the way through; bass notes thrum sparsely over one, thin, high-pitched note that borders on the inaudible, eventually becoming a thready buzz recalling a nighttime cricket chorus. The low drone returns for the final third of the piece before higher pitches overcome it and carry the sounds off into oblivion and the conclusion of this forty-minute masterpiece. Jonathan Coleclough somehow achieves comforting warmth and chilling abandonment in concert with one another, transporting the listener to a region of utter ambiguity. With Windlass, he has produced a timeless work of art. Staalplaat and Solielmoon are handling its distribution. Corporal Blossom: S/T (Micropop Recordings) Long-time assistant engineer and tape editor for Bill Laswell, Layng Martine III has been contributing high quality tracks to illbient compilations for years now under the name Corporal Blossom. A late bloomer (how was I supposed to resist the pun?) in releasing an album on his own, his self-titled debut has now finally arrived. While several of the numbers are already available on compilations like Valis I & II and Crooklyn Dub Consortium, most of the tracks are new; either way, it's convenient having all this music gathered together on one strong fifty-minute CD. With a little help from folks like DXT, Doug Scharin and Skiz Fernando, this survey of Corporal Blossom's soundworld is ample proof that his debut was well worth the wait. The illbient collage aesthetic dominates the overall sound, but the groove is funkier than the dub experiments of his peers: the bass knows its place - right in your face - and the beats are judiciously selected to pound the message home. Radio and TV samples, vinyl crackle and electronics joust with live drums, sonic worlds collide and the resulting debris makes for a very satisfying mess. A nice surprise is the presence of soft wordless vocals by Lori Carson on two consecutive tracks (Martine recently produced her latest solo album). On the merits of this CD, the Corporal most certainly deserves a promotion. Info and other stuff are available at www.layng.com. Dave Douglas: Charms of the Night Sky (Winter & Winter) I have a soft spot in my heart for contemporary trumpet and coronet players like Toshinori Kondo, Nils Petter Molvaer, Graham Haynes, Ben Neill, Thomas Heberer, all of whom aren't afraid to mix genres and produce some of the most innovative and simultaneously most "listenable" instrumental music around, whatever you choose to label it. Please allow me to now add Dave Douglas to this list. Now, I am relatively new to the whole downtown NYC scene around John Zorn and the Knitting Factory, but am aware of the fact that Douglas has been a mainstay in Zorn's Masada quartet over the years, has a solid reputation as a sideman on many an exciting project, and has long been hailed as one of the foremost new jazz musicians by critics in the know. Now I am acquainting myself with his work as a solo artist and composer. The first of these albums to reach my stereo is Charms of the Night Sky, released on the Munich-based Winter & Winter label. Beautifully packaged as befits the music within, this album features Douglas playing his own music and taking on a few covers, accompanied by Greg Cohen on bass, Mark Feldman on violin and Guy Klucevsek on accordian. The results at times sound a little klezmer, a little Viennese cafe orchestra, but always elicit an intimate little world of delicately rendered pieces wherein the four players weave in and out of one another's melodic lines in a subtle, eminently satisfying manner; the unlikely interplay of trumpet and accordian is particularly successful. As with the horn players named above, this music springs from jazz roots, but is somehow much more than "just" jazz and therefore ought to be of interest to all inquisitive ears. Mark Dresser & Frances-Marie Uitti: Sonomondo (Cryptogramophone) Two veterans of the low-end avantgarde dredge the possibilities of ambient string improvisation. Mark Dresser is a contrabass player whose curriculum vitae stretches from jazz recordings with John Zorn and Dave Douglas to creating new soundtracks for silent movie classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Un Chien Andalou. Frances-Marie Uitti is a pioneer of the two-bowed approach to her instrument, the cello. This suite of seven pieces was recorded during two meetings in 1996 and 1997 but have only recently been released by the Californian label Cryptogramophone. Eerie, brooding, and elegant, this unlikely duet makes a strong statement in admirably understated terms. Brian Eno: Kite Stories (Opal) Yet another museum piece, this time from his installation at the Finnish art gallery Kiasma in Helsinki, Kite Stories is reminiscent of both Lightness, from Brian Eno's St. Petersburg installation, and his last full-length studio ambient release, Neroli (1993). Thinking music, indeed, or perhaps, "gazing" music; one can imagine how it provided the perfect backdrop for the visuals presented at the gallery. Relatively short at thirty minutes, Kite Stories contains three studies using time-stretched voices, synthesizers, bass guitars, Japanese temple bells and sundry other sound sources, a taste of what the twelve CD players randomly programmed and placed in various positions around the gallery offered visitors. In comparison with Eno's other museum recordings, Kite Stories is perhaps not as radical an effort as Music for White Cube, but is a fine document of how his experiments in generative music are progressing. The CD has been issued in a strictly-limited edition of 500, and can be ordered directly from Eno's own label Opal Records. Ordering information is provided by the EnoWeb site. Roger Eno: The Long Walk (La Cooka Ratcha) Unlike brother Brian, who gives the impression of being the very first man to colonize cyberspace, Roger Eno seems to dwell in a pastoral Albion redolent of 19th-century English novels and the more elegiac moments of 1970s British progressive rock. After serving an apprenticeship under Brian during the early 1980s along with Michael Brook and Daniel Lanois, he struck out on a solo career in 1985 with the absolutely perfect ambient piano collection Voices, a series of vignettes reminiscent of Satie. Since then, however, he has pursued a programme of chamber music which has never quite captured the imagination with the same force as his debut. The Long Walk certainly does not lack lovely passages, such as "Someone You Once Loved", which hearkens back to Voices and showcases his skill for the sublime, and the latter half of the album features a handful of achingly beautiful piano and violin duets. The album is a leisurely saunter over the heaths and through the leafy alleyways of the countryside and as such is hardly an artistic failure. Cameo appearances by harmonica, accordian, lap steel and banjo provide further pleasant diversion along the way, but on the whole the nostalgic tone of the album has a tendency to sound retrospective rather than refreshing. A bonus CD offers four additional tracks in the same mode. Hiroshi Fujiwara: In Dub Conference (Victor), The APC Experience (APC), Flowers (Apesounds) Beauty and elegance are not necessarily always to be construed as mere romantic conceits, but can actually conceal deeper levels of cultural meaning. Japanese pianist Hiroshi Fujiwara is a case in point. On three short CDs released over the past four years, he has pursued an aesthetic of beauty and elegance which, however straightforward on the surface, seems to in fact offer the attentive listener much more than mere pleasant diversion. His sound is unique. Diaphanous melodies played on a grand piano at times accompanied by slow, seductive beats (betraying an affinity with the likes of Eraldo Bernocchi or Mick Harris) and the occasional sample, no more complex than so. He presents himself as a dub artist (and further emphasizes this claim through many of his track titles), and although echo and reverb do play their role on these recordings, the "dub" aspect is more mentality than actually studio manipulation of the sounds (with the odd notable exception, like "Dub Hunter" on The APC Experience). For example "Universal Dub", the opening track on In Dub Conference features a quiet, droning ambience expanding the space surrounding the slow, thoughtful piano stylings. "Hard Boiled Dub" on the same album begins and ends with the caress of a graceful, violin-like Japanese instrument, while on "Meconopsis" on Flowers, he abandons the piano altogether for a downright funky, bass-led groove. The same EP's closer, "Abelmoschus", explores Harold Budd territory to fine effect. On top of their musical content, each of these CDs is packaged in its own high-concept sleeve or jewel box, extending the aural enjoyment to the actual physical pleasure of its container. In Dub Conference and Flowers seem only to be available in Japan (although two of the four tracks on the latter are available on the APC compilation Abstract Depressionism); The APC Experience is available, naturally, through APC in Europe and the States. The brevity of each of these recordings - Conference is half-an-hour long, while the other two run at twenty minutes apiece - acts both as a parameter demanding the artist say as much as possible in a succinct a manner, while whetting the appetite for more. Philip Glass: Circles (Materiali Sonori) A unique new interpretation of the works of Philip Glass. Circles is a collection of Glassworks performed by Italian pianist Arturo Stalteri. While on the two pieces taken from the composer's Solo Piano Stalteri follows Glass' own transcriptions to the letter, he allows himself greater freedom (with the expressed blessing of Glass himself) on other works, such as North Star and an aria from the opera Satyagraha. On Ave Stalteri borrows Harmonia's cellist Damiano Puliti, and the result is gorgeous. Stalteri is apparently working on a project featuring Brian Eno's music (working title: Before and After the Silence) transcribed for small ensemble, for eventual release on Materiali Sonori. I'm all ears. Materiali Sonori's website: www.matson.it. Kim Gordon, Ikue Mori & DJ Olive: SYR5 (Smells Like Records) An improv trio boasting the likes of Ikue Mori on drum programming, DJ Olive on turntables and samples and Sonic Youth's bassist Kim Gordon (here featured on guitar) ought to bode well for some riveting 21st-century soundscaping. Unfortunately, aside from the ocassional stellar pattern by Mori and some yeoman work by Olive, the overall impression is one of noisy collective naval gazing and a misplaced interest in free vocalization on Gordon's behalf. Neither her quivering reed of a voice nor her lyrics (including a paean to chewing gum and an exhortation to Donald Duck to "Kill Minnie!") succeed in raising any hairs, with the possible exception of the introspective "What Do You Want?", where she pensively strums her guitar over a gorgeous bed of sound laid out by Olive. An exhilarating dash of reggae skank interrupting an implosion of feedback at the very end of the set gives an all-too-brief indication of what might have been. Mixed by Jim O'Rourke and featuring Cibo Matto's Yuka Honda on one track, SYR5 bears all the signifiers of pathbreaking avantgardism without delivering the actual goods. Michael Gordon: Weather (Coalition Recordings) Opening with a clap of thunder followed by the deep resonance of cellos, Weather by Michael Gordon of the Bang on a Can collective is a sixty-five minute piece for large string ensemble and a few surprises. Inspired by Steve Reich and apparently encouraged in the composing of the piece to imagine writing for an orchestra "playing straight up into the air", Weather is both turbulent and tranquil by turn, minimalistic and repetitive without ever becoming the least bit uninteresting. Divided into four movements of varying lengths and performed by Ensemble Resonanz, Weather might strike some as far-too literal in its depiction of meteorological phenomena at first, but the fervent execution of the piece captivates the listener in the end. Imaginative electronic elements, including a cascade of breakbeats about one-third of the way through, distinguish this work from much of the "contemporary classic" music I have heard in the last little while. Accessible but not dumb. Jeff Greinke & Anisa Romero: Hana (First World) Horowitz and Deyhim's Majoun has now been blessed with a little sister! The proud parents are ambient composer Jeff Greinke and singer Anisa Romero. Hana apparently was conceived when the pair collaborated on two pieces for a multimedia installation in the summer of 1997. It continued to gestate in the studio and some months later the album was born, on Greinke's new First World label. This music is just lovely. Romero has a sweet voice, supple as a willow branch, swaying in and around Greinke's atmospheres, which are enriched on several tracks by percussion, filling the bottom out nicely. In common with Majoun, there is a very Near Eastern feel to this record as a whole, particularly on tracks like the opener, Horse Dance, and even an African nod as far as the percussion on Sweet Sorrow goes. The vocals are wordless throughout, with the exception of two "proper" songs, seamlessly interwoven into the whole. An evocative marriage of voice and ambience. Simon Haram: Alone... (Black Box) Simon Haram is a saxophonist who has apparently worked closely with "minimalist" composers like John Adams and Michael Nyman, several of whose pieces are covered here on his new CD Alone..., all to fine effect. Haram restricts himself to the soprano sax on all the cuts, often accompanied by a small ensemble of strings. Very pretty music indeed. His cover of Bowie and Eno's Warszawa is surprisingly faithful to the original, or perhaps even closer to Philip Glass' orchestral arrangement. Over a discreetly pulsing bass and small string ensemble, the saxophone naturally takes the melodic, narrative lead, even "voicing" the Bowie nonsense vocals, the only instance on the record when a chord of dissonance is struck. In the final moments, the saxophone combines nicely with the strings to bring it all home. A fine CD, worth having if you are curious to hear the saxophone as a mild, melodious ambient instrument, though perhaps not so much for the Eno cover, which though pleasant indeed, is hardly essential. However, this CD provides yet another example of how "seriously" Eno is now being taken as a "real" composer rather than the fringe figure critics have regarded him as throughout the eighties and most of the present decade. Jon Hassell: Fascinoma (Water Lily Acoustics) Among all the so-called ambient musicians both old and new, Jon Hassell's music has always seemed to me to be imbued with the most "emotion"; while an Eno or a Budd can certainly conjure up moods and feelings with their unparalleled soundscaping abilities, Hassell's music seems to come directly from the gut and out of the bell of his trumpet itself. Therein perhaps lies the explanation: in common with Eno, many ambient artists have styled themselves as "non-musicians", idea men who are adept with a synthesizer, sequencer, programmer, whatever, but whom one rarely hears referred to as "one of the great [name of instrument here] players of our day". Hassell, on the other hand, while also a brilliant idea man, is precisely that. Over the decades since his first recording he has fashioned a trumpet sound which defies comparison - only inspires admiration and imitation. And though the whispering, breathy style which made him and his Fourth World sound famous is likely to be that which gets him into the history books, he has also shown that he can blast it and funk it up (City: Works of Fiction). Now he proves that he knows how to caress it, too. Backed up by the likes of Ry Cooder on guitar and Jacky Terrasson on piano, Hassell has chosen for the first time to interweave other composers' works with his own on Fascinoma - "musical exotica", he calls these tracks (there's a lot of that in the air nowadays, isn't there? Perhaps it is not surprising to discover that Hassell is quite good friends with David Toop, who has recently written a book on the subject). He does marvellous things with Nature Boy and Duke Ellington's Caravanesque (twice), but truth be know, he could choose to interpret "Mary Had a Little Lamb" or the old Soviet national anthem and still spellbind. Together with the five tunes he and his collaborators have penned, the ten tracks comprise a seamless, thematic whole, an exercise in stretching space and time which succeeds over every second of this recording, where the silences between notes say as much as the melodies. On Fascinoma one hears the trumpet more clearly than any previous Hassell album, its sound more rich and well-rounded than ever before. This is undoubtably the acoustic ambient album of the year, indeed one of the best jazz albums of the year, too, and a brilliant extension of the work of a constantly evolving, challenging musician. Still, all things considered this is no drastic about-face from his previous production, and fans of Possible Musics and Powerspot will feel quite at home. Graham Haynes: Organik Mekanix (Ion) I just can't figure Graham Haynes out. He makes brilliant appearances on other people's albums (e.g. Sacred System Chapter Two, Bill Laswell's Jazzonia, Russell Mills' Pearl and Umbra), but when it's time for his own solo projects, his work falls completely flat. His last solo album, Tones for the 21st Century, appeared on more trading lists than any other I can recall in the pass couple of years, and his new one, Organik Mekanix, is likely to suffer the same fate. In an interview from 1997, Haynes claimed that some people might find his ambient music "really boring," but that's because in order to properly appreciate it, "You have to sit down and get into it. When you get into it, you'll start hearing things that you didn't hear before...." While that is the case for truly accomplished ambient music, no matter how comfortably I sat and concentrated on this record, I never got into it, because there is absolutely nothing into which to get. "(Om)", the longest piece on the album at 24:52, just drones on and on without ever revealing any inner dynamic - just a little desultory tootling by Haynes and dull electronic FX supplied by his three collaborators, among them Byzar's Acustyk. The shorter tracks fare no better. While I live in hope that Graham Haynes still has a great ambient album in him somewhere, this is definitely not it. For successful and involving ambient trumpet music, stick to Jon Hassell or Ben Neill's Triptychal. Katsuya Hironaka:Golden Days With the Portland-based Hypnos label recently announcing new collaborative efforts to be undertaken together with the Japanese electronician Katsuya Hironaka, I find the moment opportune to review this artist's excellent solo release on his own BLT label earlier in 1997. Golden Days  is packaged with an insert that reminds one of Brian Eno's seminal Another Green World , and indeed, the Ghost of Eno Past does seem to lurk somewhere in the background throughout this recording - acting as an influence on Hironaka, not turning him into an epigone. The CD begins with a track invitingly enough entitled Pause, where the welling up of Tokyo street sounds ebbs away to be replaced by a soothing synth, soon punched up by a loud, tinny beat, which far from jarring the senses, sets the foot a'tapping. Passing combines reverberating, English-language (newscasters? politicians?) soundbytes with a little electric piano riff which puts me in mind of West Coast Adult-Oriented Rock, for some reason - Bruce Hornsby territory. But looped into this context with the samples and increment electronics, it becomes the exact opposite of AOR - ie., supple artistry which is eminently engaging. This electric piano is the scarlet thread throughout the album, its unique characteristic, weaving the tracks together. Track three Preview, once again imposes insistent, sampled voices on a bed of soft electronics, while the fourth track breaks both the alliterative as well as the stylistic conformity. Entitled Cast, it puts the same talented fingers to work on similar electric-piano riffs, but now backed up by distinctly (though discreetly) drum-and-bass rhythms. Things drift a little aimlessly after this until the momentum is regained with a vengence on the track Cloud 12, where jazzy doodlings and waftings are punched awake by searing electronic combinations. And just before rounding off, Pause returns in what one might characterize as an electronic-dub arrangement of the number subtitled (Gallery Mix). Can't decide which version I prefer - the original, more condensed, driving one, or this more relaxed, drawn-out (over 10 minutes) and sparse rendition. Luckily, both are to be found on this full-length. I look forward to any and all new releases by this promising artist. (This record seems to lack European/American distribution, but can be ordered directly from BLT's website.) Richard Horowitz & Sussan Deyhim:Majoun (Ion) East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet, wrote the constipated old poet laureate of Victorian England. Nowadays, with all the world's musics at their fingertips in a way previous generations of composers could never even imagine, East and West not only have met, but are on rather intimate terms with one another. A prime example is this long-awaited new collaboration between New York City multi-instrumentalist Richard Horowitz and Teheran-born songstress Sussan Deyhim. A previous showcase of their work together, Desert Equations: Azax Attra, on the Made to Measure series released by Crammed Discs, contained work compiled from continuous efforts at development during the eighties; the results were occasionally stunning, but as a whole there is a fragmentary feel of snapshot possibilities rather than full-fledged panoramic sense of purpose. All such qualifications are swept away by this 1997 release on Sony Classical. Justifiably characterized as "compositionally rigorous" by Horowitz in an interview, Majoun is a tapestry of heady, inspirational swirls of sound and colour. The multi-tracked voice of Deyhim, while in a class of its own, never dominates the instrumental imaginativeness of Horowitz. While the opening, title track (a logical progression from the track "I'm a Man" on Desert Equations) and the fourth, "Whorls on the Mount of Moon", stand out as miniature masterpieces in their own right, the whole album gels in a way to make this hour of music bore its way into your consciousness and set up permanent residency there. (The care in producing this album is evident in Horowitz' statement that he did enough remixes of "Whorls on the Mount of Moon" to fill three CDs - release them! Release them!) A plethora of guest musicians, including (on most tracks) the Moroccon National Radio and Television Orchestra String Section, create a sound that marries the far-flung influences perfectly to one another, rather than resulting in an interesting collection of cultural juxtapositions. In summation, simply a breath-taking piece of work; perhaps it should not be classified under the ambient umbrella, for from the very start, its magical arrangements and Deyhim's enticing vocals act like a magnet, drawing all attention in the room toward the music. Let us hope that we do not have to wait ten more years before the next collaboration between Deyhim and Horowitz is released. Two Thumbs Up! Kozo Inada: a[] (Staalplaat) For the teeny tiny noises crowd, three tracks by this debutant. "a[0]": Nearly inaudible clicks dance back and forth between speakers. "a[1]": Quiet white becomes louder white noise. "a[2]" Water sounds transform into more white noise. All (?) this in just over thirteen minutes. The collectors will fall for the packaging, apparently the first of a series for Staalplaat: a full-size red CD, with a darker red "dot" in the middle masking the music, is housed in a clear plastic jewel case impregnated with something resembling bubble wrap and which creates a bizarre, hallucinatory 3D effect. To be perfectly honest, I received more enjoyment getting dizzy looking at the jewel case as I tilted it this way and that than from the music itself. Jliat: one chance out between two worlds (Strange Circus) Perhaps there is little point from a consumer standpoint in reviewing a CD that was released in a limited edition of a mere fifty-five copies on a tiny Japanese label, but from the perspective of aesthetic accomplishment, this record deserves attention and praise. Jliat dwells stubbornly upon the ambient drone and has released nearly a dozen CDs exploring the drone as "a thing in itself", the quasi-religious exercise of sound enjoying being sound for its own sake. With one chance out between two worlds I do believe Jliat has achieved some sort of Nirvana of drone - it's utterly entrancing and belongs to the best work in the field. A long braid of tones is pulled taut and then threatens to disappear into silence before swelling up again. It all adds up to an hour of majestic soundscaping. If you can resist playing it more than once at a time, that is. I recommend pushing the "repeat" button at every opportunity. No idea if copies of this recording are still available, but a discography and MP3s are available at this site: www.jliat.demon.co.uk. Bill Laswell: Hear No Evil (2 CD Meta) On 1988´s Hear No Evil Bill Laswell led a tight ensemble of Eastern and Western musician through a half-dozen bluesy fusion pieces. Featuring guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, violinist Shankar, tabla masterZakir Hussein and African percussionist Aiyb Dieng, this record still sounds as fresh as it did twelve years ago (with the exception of the cloying hayseed Westernisms of "Illinois Central"). The players trade off one another with consummate skill and sensitivity and the result is a minor monument to a very special type of World Music with its feet firmly planted in the American soil. Exquisitely repackaged by Russell Mills for Meta, this re-release features a bonus CD slightly longer than the original featuring long ambient remixes of the first and last tracks. Transforming them into elegant, elongated ragas, Laswell brings the tabla to the fore, and adds further colouration via incursions by the Material Strings, led by Karl Berger. A patent Laswell ambient mix translation entirely in the spirit of the original. Bill Laswell: Rasa: Serene Timeless Joy (Meta) Rasa may just be Bill Laswell's finest exercise in True Ambient ever. Layered over soundscapes captured at the Buddhist monument Borobudur and its surrounding sacred mountains in Java, magical tones, bell-like loops and soft tom-toms develop organically for a full hour. Rich and varied, its evolution is both linear and cyclical. The piece quite simply "breathes", in the way in which a classic Vidna Obmana record does. Wave upon wave of sonic stillness washes up and recedes, only to reveal new and unexpected charms. And interestingly for a Laswell album, the bass doesn't make its appearance until the thirty-sixth minute, and then only as a brief interlude. Truly timeless music. The Inspirational Sounds of Mad Professor (Universal Egg) With all the excitement generated by the new directions dub is taking - digidub, Laswellian dub translations, Berlin/Cologne minimal techno dub - maybe it's time for a refresher course in roots dub, which continues to thrive and jive unabated. Neil Fraser aka Mad Professor has been twisting dials and minds from behind the control panel at his Ariwa Studio in Great Britain for many a moon now, faithful to the tradition of King Tubby, Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo. Through his work and that of Adrian Sherwood at On-U Sound, their legacy lives on, not the least in the flourishing of new dub in the UK in the past few years (have a listen to Dub Revolution. UK Roots: High Steppin' to the Future on ROIR for unimpeachable evidence). In common with the Jamaican masters, the Mad Professor is so prolific and his work scattered among so many B-sides, white labels and CD collections that it is almost impossible to keep up, or even get a decent bead on the terrain. Where to start? This has now been remedied by the good folks at Universal Egg, who have now released a compilation of Mad Professor tracks culled from 20 years of material. Lovingly housed in a garishly-coloured foldout digipak including a thick booklet with interviews and other information, this is indeed the comprehensive guide to the Mad Professor's pulsating world. Several cuts have never been available on CD before, making this compilation an even more cherished possession. A great debt of gratitude is due Zion Train (the UK band behind Universal Egg) for making these obscurities and classics available for our enjoyment and edification. Check out www.wobblyweb.com/ue. Moondog: Telpmas (Kopf) Somebody has just got to write a book about this guy. Born Louis T. Hardin in Kansas in 1916 (and claiming to be a relative of the outlaw John Wesley Hardin), Moondog was blinded in an accident at seventeen years of age, spent some time among the Arapaho Indians (where he developed his life-long affection for percussion), and moved to NYC in 1943, where he cultivated an enormous beard and spent thirty years standing on a street corner playing his music and reciting his poetry. Hung out with Benny Goodman and Charlie Parker, was hailed by Philip Glass and Steve Reich as a precursor of minimalism, declaimed verse with Allen Ginsberg, appeared on stage with Lenny Bruce and Tiny Tim, made movies with William Burroughs. Suddenly, in 1974, he disappeared from his usual corner and many assumed he was dead; Paul Simon even went on television lamenting his passing. Turned out he had merely moved to Germany without telling anyone. He passed away for real last September. For some time now, the German label Kopf has been releasing works by Moondog, but only recently have they received wider distribution. Among the numerous meretricious recording available are H'art Songs (Moondog singing his own "naive" songs to piano accompaniment); A New Sound for an Old Instrument (miniatures for two pipe organs and percussion); and Sax Pax for A Sax, minimalistic swing for an all-saxophone orchestra. But none of them are quite the masterpiece which his work Elpmas might just be. Recorded in 1991, Elpmas is a thematic work dedicated to the aboriginal peoples of the world. Moondog composes very gentle music, led by his own marimba playing on many of the cuts, but interspersed with very "American" sounds like the banjo, discreetly sampled ethnic (African balaphone, Japanese koto, Indian bells) and environmental (children, rainstorms, some pretty badass sounding birds) sounds, and strings that sound directly lifted from the Renaissance court of some Medici. The occasional vocal incursion by a small men's choir (led, somewhat surprisingly, by Andi Thoma, one half of Mouse on Mars, who also co-produced) propels the narrative forward, most effectively on the charming faux horse opera "Westward Ho!". But this is primarily an instrumental album clad in a coat of many colours, and is thus appropriately concluded with a twenty-five minute "Cosmic Meditation", an ambient piece of Enoesque complex simplicity and beauty. Aki Onda: Beautiful Contradiction and Un Petit Tour (All Access) A new voice emerges from Japan and immediately stakes its claim to a territory all its own. Thirty-one-year-old Aki Onda has paid his dues in elektro, noise and hiphop, as well as being a sought-after producer, and now emerges as an ambitious soundscaper of great gifts. A mature hand guides the sounds culled from collaborators as diverse as Europeans Simon Fisher Turner, Blixa Bargeld and Noël Akchoté and brilliant Japanese players like Jyoji Sawada, Kazutoki Umeza and Onda himself (cassette recorder, sampler, programming), with a handful of American avantjazz names like Steven Bernstein and Ben Perowsky thrown in for good measure. Recorded in London, Tokyo, New York and Paris, his first solo CD Beautiful Contradiction has the atmosphere of an imaginary movie soundtrack. Opening with Chrysanthemum, an ambient piece of great beauty which then gives way to the sampler/flugelhorn/guitar duel of Red Light, the record thus embarks on a fifty-minute journey featuring an array of styles and top-flight musicians so diverse yet so cohesive, and including occasional vocals in German (the wonderfully suggestive In Windungen sung by Bargeld), Turkish and English (a slightly seedy story of doomed love growled forth by Linda Sharrock). Rosemary is a remarkable composition featuring the trilling of glassharps propelled along a bed of electronics by snare drum, while Petal is a short jazz chamber piece that wouldn't sound out of place on one of John Zorn's Masada ensemble recordings. Beautiful Contradiction dwells at the crossroads of acoustic and electronic music, extracting the essences of both and producing something quite unique in the process. The final impression is that of a restless cosmopolitan in love with sound, not merely for its own sake but for its narrative properties. The second and latest release, Un Petit Tour, is unavoidably more of a hörspiel due to the predominance of narration - reflections on love penned mostly by Onda and told in French by several voices. The spoken words are linked a kind of free-jazz scarlet thread, with the trumpet of Bernard Vitet (a little bit Hassell, a little bit Kondo) and the programming of Onda dominating. A delicate solo on the Japanese sanshin by Jyoji Sawada (who by the way is all over Beautiful Contradictions, playing a wide array of instruments and even composing one of its tracks) leads off the track Oú es-tu donc?, before other instruments begin scraping away at its fragile veneer. The music on this release is much more jagged than on Beautiful Contradiction, though the smokey, late-night guitar/trumpet duet which closes the album is just lovely. Both are packaged in equally handsome digipaks, with the latter featuring a gallery of photographs by Ayako Mogi which serve well as a visual complement to the sounds within. Aki Onda is an artist worth keeping a very close eye on in the years to come. Pablo's Eye: Realismo (Surface to Air) In my mind one of the most thought-provoking ongoing projects of the past decade. Pablo's Eye have evolved throughout the nineties from their song-based, self-titled debut, through multifacetted soundscaping highlights like You Love Chinese Food, to a unique form of quasi-dub experimentation on their last few releases. In between there have been commissions like Barcelona (Architects of), for the 1992 Olympics, the mini-album Devotions, and the music for a CD-ROM on the Holocaust. Realismo is yet another mini-album, this one clocking in at thirty-odd minutes, and can be appreciated as a further extension of the concerns featured on their last full-length, All She Wants Grows Blue (Swim), though without the exotically-inflected vocals of Marie Mandi. Not conventional dub in the JA sense (though they have put that style through its paces in their long cut "The Switchback" on the Extreme tenth anniversary double CD), Realismo stretches sound and explores its every nuance. While imaginative beats have been the engine driving every Pablo's Eye release, instead of propelling the music up into the stratosphere and featuring pristine guitar chords as previously, they now deflect it into echoing underground chasms and allow it to bounce around the walls for a spell. To put a disc by Pablo's Eye on the CD is to embark on an excursion through some fifth world, where understatement is the vehicle for profound adventures in listening. Arvo Pärt: Alina (ECM New Series) The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's latest ECM release contains only two pieces, Für Alina and Spiegel im Spiegel, in two and three versions, respectively. They were recorded four years ago, and the reason for the delay in releasing them is not explained in the liner notes. But one thing is sure: It is certainly not a case of having no new Pärt product to peddle and wheeling out old outtakes to keep the punters happy. Für Alina is one of the seven works performed in Tallinn in 1976, when the composer broke his famed silence after several years of musical crisis, while Spiegel im Spiegel was written two years later. Both are utterly sublime. Pärt's compositional technique exploits the silences between notes, offering these spaces as places for the listener to contemplate their slow disappearance and be drawn inside the music itself. He once commented that he had found his new way of composing by asking a street sweeper he met in his hometown how one was supposed to write music; the man answered, "I think one has to love every note, every single tone". Alina is proof that he took the man at his word. Spiegel im Spiegel is presented in versions for violin or cello and piano, while Für Alina's two versions are actually selected phrases from pianist Alexander Malter's several-hour long improvisation on the piece made by Pärt himself. While his music has now become a standard part of the late 20th-century repertoire, appearing on endless recordings from around the world, it is still to ECM's Pärt CDs that one should turn to experience the true essence of his music. Alina is both a very good place to start for the uninitiated and an essential gem for those already enamoured of Arvo Pärt's unique sound. Ponga: Ponga Remixes (Loosegroove) Ponga's self-titled debut arrived last year as something of a revelation for an unsuspecting and, I fear, very small public. Consisting of two old jazz hands from the downtown NYC scene, keyboardist Wayne Horvitz and drummer Bobby Previte, aided and abetted by two younger Seattle musicians, the album presented a jolting and refreshing mix of avantjazz, improvisation, soundscaping, and something very much akin to illbient. Among its many strengths was the presence of "live" drumming as opposed to drum programming. Jazz had listened to its epigones among the drum'n'bass crowd and heard something new, only to respond with a classy hybrid of its own. With Ponga Remixes the youngsters get a chance to reply. All remix projects are, of course, not created equal; some add nothing particularly special to the initial experience while others may even outshine the original. Housed in a clear plastic jewel case bearing only a list of tracks and remixers glued to its back (further information can be found at www.loosegroove.com/ponga_remix.html), this remix CD is a welcome companion piece to the original release, even if it does not come close to overshadowing it. Nine remixes by the likes of Amon Tobin, Spacetime Continuum and Fila Brazillia are bookended by two new tracks by the group. Lotsa fun, but the original is the real blast. Pre Fade Listening: Way Back Home (Different Drummer) Way Back Home by Pre Fade Listening (a two-man English outfit) is quite simply one of the best ambient releases of the 1998. Imagine if emit still existed and released a dubbier version of Woob; or if Universal Egg had continued to explore the niche it began carving out with releases by Extremadura and Sounds from the Ground a couple of years ago. Way Back Home is not the heavy, traditional JA dub, but rather the best example I have heard of True Ambient Dub. With simple means (bass,percussion, organ, melodica, the occasionally flute and vocal sample), this sixty-minute excursion explores the possibilities inherent in space without every resorting to reverb overkill or cheap gestures. In its review, The Wire got it right (for once?): "It's not about how big and booming your bass is; it's about the tonal depth and its effect on everything around it." Highly recommended to warm up those cold winter evenings ahead. Alessandro Raina: Colonia Paradíes (Cane Andaluso) A strange little album harbouring the ambition of breathing life into the ghosts of the tiny moutain village of Montalto Pavese near Milan. While listening to it, I could not help but think of Christ Stopped at Eboli, a remarkable book by Carlo Levi later turned into an equally remarkable film, about a similarly isolated village which time forgot in southern Italy. Best appreciated as a multimedia work, the music is meant to be heard while perusing the collection of ancient photographs of people, places and festivities paired with bilingual reminiscences included in this handsomely designed digipak. Raina, a twenty-two-year-old self-taught musician, characterizes Colonia Paradíes as "involuntary folk music", conjured forth through a combination of casual guitar melodies and taped documentary of voices and environments. Presented as miniatures and in concert with the grainy photographs, this album certainly strives gamely to capture the remembrance of things past, though the aural snapshots at times seem a shade underdeveloped. Robert Rich: Humidity (3 CD Hypnos/Soundscape) Humidity is a meteorological phenomenon giving rise to discomfort - the stickiness, the thickness and closeness of the air, and the ever-imminent threat of heat lightning tearing the night sky asunder. Oozing its own sodden atmosphere, Robert Rich´s triple CD documents concerts from three hot (I must assume) Californian nights in 1998. Each individual CD is christened after the town in which the performance took place - Stanford, Venice and Pasadena. Entirely improvised and featuring acoustic ethnic instruments and disembodied voices rising above layered electronic textures, the listener is impressed by the sheer variety and imagination offered over some three hours. Of added interest is the interweaving of reworked versions of two cuts from his seminal collaboration with Lustmord, Stalker, into the mix. At times the music buries its snout deep in the moist earth, then claws its way up to emerge into a dank landscape of industrial abandonment, the rusty clonkings of ancient machines echoing like a reminder of the passing of the industrial age. But it also strives far up into the aether, especially when Rich purses his lips and brings his flute to them, proffering gusts of fresh, revitalizing air. A must of the fans of isolationism, a superb introduction to the work of Rich for the novice and an exemplary archival project on behalf of Hypnos, perhaps the foremost ambient label in America today. Scanner vs DJ Spooky: The Quick and the Dead (Sulphur) Scanner is many things to many people (eavesdropper, soundscaper, builder of installations), and one of them is catalyst bringing out the best in other artists. In producing and partially remixing Si-{cut}.db´s Behind You, for instance, he made him sound better than he ever had or has since. And now he kicks off a new run of collaborations with the first release in the new "Meld" series by taking DJ Spooky in hand. Spooky himself is of course a multidimensional artist of almost frightening capacity and creativity. However, his most recent recordings have seemed disappointingly misdirected. Just too many ideas, perhaps. Teaming up with Scanner redirects his genius for illbient soundscaping back on the right track as the two dredge the transatlantic cable separating them for the sounds in between the sounds. An outbreak of hip hop ("Uncanny") and a booming bass groove punctuate deftly constructed webs of sound, including delicate passages of sampled African kora, seductive as the sound of a wooden windchime swaying in the wind. One time the beats, bass and some other African-sounding stringed instrument unite for an edgy rembetika ("Guanxi"). Fans of Songs of a Dead Dreamer will find themselves back on solid Spooky ground, while Scanner´s faithful will just continue to marvel at the versatility of their man. Includes a guest appearance of the father of all samplers, Thomas Edison. Antonio Testa & Alio Die: Healing Herb's Spirit and Five Thousand Spirits: Mesmeric Revelation (Crowd Control Activities) Two collaborative efforts starring Italian ambient minimalist Stefano Musso, aka Alio Die. Healing Herb's Spirit is a perfect example of everything that is right with ethno-ambient music. Gorgeous, slowly-evolving atmospheres - perhaps best exemplified on the track Icaros - conjuring both comfort and unease are lent pulse and physicality through Antonio Testa's exotic percussion, ranging from the rattling of sea shells to beating of the "water pumpkin". A strangely aquatic atmosphere dominates throughout, but be wary of the undertow. Trading under the name Five Thousand Spirits, Mesmeric Revelation pairs Musso with Raffaele Serra in five untitled pieces. The first, at over thirty minutes taking up half the record, is an exploration of subtle drones flavoured with sparing percussive elements and the odd synthesizer twinkle. Stellar. In comparison the four remaining tracks appear as miniatures (on track three, Serra makes excellent use of a harmonium), brief exercises in timbre and tone, interesting but overshadowed by the majesty of the first track. Thermal + Seofon: A Monument of Chance (Boxman); Atoi Mystery School: Y2Kaos (2 CD Mystery School); Thermal + Freezer + CUE: Time Out of Mind (Boxman) Three recent releases from Thermal, Seofon and various co-conspiritors. A Monument of Chance contains four thoughtfully constructed soundscapes whose common framework consists of insistent beats and loops laced with synthesizers and samples. "Application of Buddhistic Classics" is appropriately Eastern in sound, though that aesthetic seems to inform quite a bit of the music contained within. Altogether an intelligent album, much like the comments often submitted to Hyperreal's Ambient List by Thermal's creative force, Joshua Maremont. The double CD Y2Kaos, on the other hand, is curiosly unengaging. For 2 x 73 minutes, the various artists go through all the usual trance motions, beats chugging along, "mystical" voices and messages surfacing and then receding. Some of this music was recorded live in San Franciscan chill rooms, and perhaps that is the proper milieu in which to fully appreciate it. Time Out of Mind shares its title with the latest Bob Dylan album, but I can assure readers that the resemblance stops there, if we disregard the excellent production values of both records. A quieter affair than Monument..., this CD is an all-list member production, featuring Maremont solo as Thermal; Freezer, where he is joined by Peter Becker; and CUE aka Charles Uzzell-Edwards, Fax's American friend and sometime poster. "Tone Ref" by Thermal places quiet beats in the forefront, while guitars wail somewhere beyond the horizon, the whole thing culminating in an almost "Ode to Joy"-ous climax. Maremont teams up with Becker on "Ether Leak", which pursues roughly the same ideas, but also features the extra added attraction of spurts of muted coronet punctuating the process. Very, very nice ambient. Finally, CUE and Thermal submit "71 Scuba - Owl Service", perhaps the most introspective track of the three on offer here, a fine closer to an extremely engaging seventy minutes. Twilight Circus Dub Sound System: Dub Voyage (M Records) Mad scientist Ryan Moore, Nijmegen by way of Vancouver, continues to churn out bone-rattling dub that is strictly essential. Driven wheezingly onward by organ and piano, this music hacks its way through the jungle underbrush while sure-footedly following the path trodden by studio geniuses of the Jamaican past. Melodically perhaps not quite as distinctive as last year's Horsie, Dub Voyage nevertheless delights with tunes like "Wareika", featuring a ghostly now-you-hear-it, now-you-don't melodica. Another solid showcase of deep serious rhythms and rubbery space manipulation. Undark: 3396 (emit) A totally unique album, perhaps the pinnacle of the late, lamented emit series of cutting-edge ambience and electronica. With decades of installation and graphic design work behind him, Russell Mills has built up a network of musical friends almost mind-boggling in both quantity and quality. Thus the contributors to his debut CD include Michael Brook, Hywel Davies, Brian Eno, Roger Eno, Bill Laswell, David Sylvian and The Edge. Albums jam-packed with guest stars are not so uncommon; however, Mills' accomplices, rather than visiting the studio to sit in on sessions, have allowed him to plunder their own sound catalogues or created specific sounds for him to do with as he would. In some cases this implies a song specially written and performed for the album (Sylvian's spectral How Safe is Deep?) or a string quartet commisioned from Davies, which rises dramatically out of the subaquatic murk of Blood is Rising. In other instances, bits are recycled from previous work, like Laswell's growling bass thrusts on Rain in Our Room (which can also be heard on the track Atoms to Suns from Valis II: Everything Must Go, and which, unsurprisingly, is dedicated to Mills). You may never again hear an album crammed with so much sonic information and entertainment, at the same time as each piece is so carefully sculpted by Mills that every individual sound both comes into its own while remaining perfectly in concert with the others, like a jigsaw puzzle piece that fits just so. Various Artists: Abstract Depressionism (APC) Having heard just about all of the CDs released by APC, the Parisian fashion house with excellent musical taste to boot, I feel confident in venturing that Abstract Depressionism ranks among the best they've put out, a strong contender alongside the jazzy dub offerings on APC Tracks_ Vols. 1 & 2. Produced by Bill Laswell and Jean Touitou, Abstract Depressionism has a fine cast: two tracks each by Hiroshi Fujiwara, Eraldo Bernocchi (whose trademark "sound" I would say informs the whole of this compilation), Mick Harris, DXT and Laswell (under the guises of Praxis and Material, respectively); and one each by Mami Chan and Solo (who may or may not be APC boss Touitou himself). An essential CD for those who enjoy illbient-type soundscapes and the world of dark dub and rhythms Bernocchi has been exploring as SIMM and into which he has successfully drawn Laswell and Harris on the Equations of Eternity releases. There's not a single uninteresting cut on this 70 minute CD, and in stating that I even include the sweet little opening number by Fujiwara, which provides an interesting contrast to the heavier material to follow. The Laswell contributions are stalwart efforts, the first of which ranks alongside the best in the genre. Praxis' "Dreadnot" pits eerily swirling strings against a solid beat, with Laswell taking the piano sample from "Red Night" on Oscillation and tweaking it nicely indeed, while Material's shorter "Downward" has shades of spaghetti Westernisms in its guitar pluckings. But I wonder if Solo's, DXT's and Bernocchi's stuff aren't at least as strong as "Dreadnot". Repeated listenings recommended. A handsome package featuring twelve excellent variations on a theme, so to speak. The disc can be ordered directly from APC's website. Various Artists: Apokalypsis Explicata The Swedish label Multimood really lives up to its name, by releasing a broad spectrum of ambient and experimental electronica. In celebration of ten years of plugging away on the geographic periphery, it has just released this 2 CD collection, featuring twenty pieces which prove that artistically at least, there is  no periphery anymore (and, it thus follows, no centre). Contributions are drawn from Sweden and Continental Europe, the States and Australia, and all the cuts save Shinjuku Thief's receive their premiere here, though a number of them were composed and/or recorded as far back as 1995 (though the tooth of time has been kind). Hans Fahlberg is  Multimood Records. With admirable discernment and vision, he has built up a small but quality catalogue of disparate artists (which can be viewed at the Multimood website). The other scarlet thread running through all Multimood releases is the distinctive artwork in which they are clad. This new release is no exception: the design bluntly and humourously reminds the reader of the above-mentioned geographic location by featuring the famous "Swedish Match" matchbox, a view of the port of Gothenburg and toy hockey players. Apokalypsis Explicata opens chaotically with a fourth world run-in by M'Lumbo, and then gets bogged down in some industrial-strength abstract noise/sound expeditions. Welcome and beaty relief is offered by Oil in the Eye's "Callipers" (Oil in the Eye is one Manuel Puyo, btw, and last year's solo debut _Within_ on Malpractice Records was a gem). After one Gregorio Bardini treats the ears to a dark Romantic flute piece (floating uneasily over a bed of menacing, subaquatic sounds), a nifty segue is pulled off by the "altered clarinet" sound of Tween Deck 2 from Sweden, which rapidly degenerates into something more grating and even more gratifying. A quiet beat provides orientation through a fascinating aural collage. Robert Rich checks in with the grandiloquently-titled "A Flock of Metal Creatures Fleeing the Onslaught of Rust" - the type of completely beatless, subterranean drone that he does so well; but which Michael Winnerholt then succeeds in topping with his track, by moving it above ground and allowing the drone to shimmer. The first CD ends with an unassuming but interesting piece by Hans-Joachim Roedelius and friend, that teases the listener at the outset with a little ethnic flavour, before slowly deconstructing itself into a groaning din and disappearing. CD 2 opens ever so quietly with Shinjuku Theif ("17/21") and Vidna Obmana ("Shaking the Surreal" - a beauty), and maintains that amorphous tone with a track by Tonal, before the German composer Peter Frohmader's "Mission X" opens up. This is a twelve-minute tour-de-force that begins ever-so-quietly with some introspective electronica under sampled snatches of radio, before a funky jazz band muscles its way onto the stage. At around the six-and-a-half minute mark it gets even funkier as some Laswell-wannabe cranks up the bass. About two minutes later the funk starts wearing off, a muted coronet assumes the lead, the band starts to fade out, and a denouement of rumblings slowly takes us away from this remarkable place. It's just not what you expect on a compilation like this,...which is what you should expect from Multimood! Jeff Greinke gets things back to "normal" with the lovely "Ketembe" and an American act called CC: Dome checks in with a wonderful, rolling and echoing number called "Dr. 1 (Molasses Mix)", adding layer upon layer to a very simple and very lovely melody. The last fifteen minutes of the CD is marred by a noise collage by Mark Kirschenmann which really loused up my mood, before Asmus Tietchens rows the thing home with a routine entry. 20 artists, nineteen original cuts - this is an exceptionally varied and successful compilation. Four thumbs up (two for each disc)! Various Artists: Arctic Circles 2 and Circular: Divergent(Beatservice) One of the best ambient compilations ever has got to be Arctic Circles: A Selection of Subzero Soundscapes, and its second installment is a worthy successor. However, this time around cool beats edge out icy soundscapes. While one regrets the absence of Biosphere (ironically, the artist who submitted possibly the most danceable track to the first release), the twelve artists here - including eight returnees from the first volume - easily compensate for his absence, providing a broad survey of the continued robust state of Norwegian electronica. Things seem to be warming up over there. Divergent certainly lives up to its promotional hype. The duo of Bjarte Andreasson and Jostein Dahl Gjelsvik have constructed a pastiche of early nineties electro-ambient hearkening back to all your faves - Namlook, Lifeforms, Global Communications, you name it. Impossible not to like if you are a fan of those who inspired them and perhaps a very fitting coda to the decade in which ambient was reborn in the chillrooms of the world. Vidna Obmana & Alio Die: Echo Passage (Musica Maxima Magnetica) The long awaited collaboration between Belgian ambienteer extraordinaire Vidna Obmana and Italian soundscaper Alio Die is an unadulterated delight. Having previously worked in tandem on a track from Vidna Obmana's brilliant The Spiritual Bonding, their first full-length dual effort presents two singular artists combining their talents into one remarkable whole. A lone extended track, Echo Passage unfolds with the patience of the ages as the pair loop, en-drone and texturize the aether over a good seventy minutes. Never static, this is a restive yet busy place - sands shift, voices arise briefly and humbly before subsiding, winds and waters are caught up in eddies before resuming their irresistible course. Unimaginable worlds are broached as a possibility and then abandoned to the cosmic mist in favour of others. Breathtaking. Vidna Obmana & Willem Tanke: Variations for Organ, Keyboard and Processors (Multimood); Vidna Obmana: The Surreal Sanctuary (Hypnos); The Vidna Obmana juggernaut rolls on unimpeded. Every few months a new CD arrives from his Serenity Studio in Belgium, and every time, the quality is just as high. In the past couple of years collaborations have dominated his output, and the combination of his talents with the likes of Steve Roach, Asmus Tietchens and Alio Die has unfailingly expanded the boundaries of the universe they all inhabit. Recently he has begun choosing unlikelier collaborators, like jazz guitarist Serge Devadder and now, Dutch classical organist Willem Tanke. As its title indicates, Variations for Organ, Keyboard and Processors is an ambitious work. Willem Tanke has composed a series of pieces inspired by Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics from 1975, a comparative study of Western physics and Eastern mysticism staking a claim for remarkable similarities between the two. Vidna Obmana has rearranged and treated ("recycled" is the term he prefers to use) certain extracts from these pieces. The combination of the staid church organ and state-of-the-art electronics reflects the east/west, ancient/modern dichotemy of the text inspiring the artists. On his sophomore release for Hypnos, Vidna Obmana's first solo work since Crossing the Trail (recorded in 1996-97) treads confindently onto a kind of avantgarde ambient path, which he intends to continue exploring on The Contemporary Nocturne, a companion piece scheduled for release on the same label later in the year. The distinctive ethno rhythms of previous solo efforts have receded into the background as an atmosphere of pure minimalism is striven for and successfully achieved. Vidna Obmana claims that The Surreal Sanctuary is deliberately more sombre, wintry and monochrome than the kaleidescopic brilliance of much of his previous work. Indeed, a sanctuary is by definition a place of retreat and reflection as opposed to the open, life-affirming spaces suggested by titles likeA River of Appearance or Echoing Delight. Cerebral and yet emotionally appealing, reminiscent of the dark caverns of the soul in which Robert Rich can often be found spelunking, The Surreal Sanctuary sees Vidna Obmana ploughing new furrows in the sonic soil without abandoning the trademark mood which characterizes his earlier work. A record to play and replay many times in order to fully explore its quiet magnificence. Stephen Vitiello: The Light of Falling Cars (JdK); Frances-Marie Uitti & Stephen Vitiello: Uitti/Vitiello (JdK); Stephen Vitiello: Scratchy Marimba (Sulphur) And so yet another fascinating new artist's profile comes into focus. Though Stephen Vitiello is hardly a rookie on the avant music scene. While pretty well-hidden from the eyes of the general public most of the time, Vitiello has been anything but invisible on the New York City scenes in the past decade, making video art, scoring for dance, and curating musical events, most recently at the Whitney Museum. However, he has only recently begun releasing his music with some regularity and accruing the accolades he so rightly deserves. The Light of Falling Cars is a veritable smorgasbord of aural inventiveness, featuring sonic manipulations, guitar bending, and the famed accordian drone of Pauline Oliveros on two tracks. The press apparently once hailed Vitiello for creating "listenable avant-garde music", hearkening back to the praise which greeted Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach all those years ago. Found sounds are stretched and compressed beyond recognition, guitars are fed through "broken speakers", electronic chaos is tamed by warm organ tones. On "Hahn + Tape", the violinist Hahn Rowe duels with backward-running tape before his sweet caresses become more assertive in the title tracks' droning ethno-clash. The absolute highlight on an album whose topography is studded with peaks occurs when Vitiello and Oliveros encounter one another on "Trio" ("with Hahn added later") and "Duo", providing a deep-listening experience of impeccable delicacy. An album which provokes new thoughts about what sound can do. Uitti/Vitiello, also on JdK, is a 3" mini-album truly minimalistic in all its aspects. Housed in a tiny slipcase featuring nothing but the same photograph of a desert landscape with camel both front and back, and no more information proffered than the last names of the artists on the disc itself, this music spends one second less than twenty minutes creeping and crawling along the desert floor as Uitti rubs and grinds her double bow across the strings of her cello as Vitiello encourages her with an array of low, at times dry, at times muddy electronic gasps and moans. One cannot shake the feeling that something ominous is going on, that someone has discovered a corpse lying in the dirt and is trying to figure out whether to drag it away or dig it its final resting place on the spot. Quietly tortured strings and substratum electronica finally recede as Uitti provides a sweet-sounding coda accompanied by Vitiello's muted, motorik beat before the whole thing ends with a soft murmur. On the second offering from Robin Rimbaud's Meld series, Vitiello presents thirty-eight fresh, beatier minutes featuring the talents of friends like Scanner himself, Rowe and the imaginative drummer Dean Sharp. Scratchy Marimba is a minor revelation. Fractured beats and subtle sound bending dominate the first two tracks - the second of which, "Scratchy Marimba Meets the Low Pass Shrew", recalls Glass' contemporary Steve Reich - while "Loudmouth" is pointillist funk and "Forget What You Came For" a Scannerized brain teaser. After four tracks of astonishingly deft colour and depth, the finale of "Taxi Take Off Turbulence and Landing" and its de-mix comprise a surprisingly unengaging denouement. Regardless, these three CDs provide a window into the sonic world of an artist gifted with so much imagination that future releases are eagerly anticipated. Jah Wobble: 30 Hertz Collection (Meta) A sort of sampler assembled by Janet Rienstra at Meta from the seven full-length CDs Jah Wobble has released on his own label, 30 Hertz Records. The album marshalls an impressive cast of singers like Sussan Deyhim and Natacha Atlas and players of instruments including members of his Invaders of the Heart and Deep Space ensembles and musicians from China and the Subcontinent. Despite this, removing each tune from its original album context has resulted in a kind of unchallenging ethno-muzak. The tension achieved on better Wobble albums through his juxtaposition of styles and cultures seems to have been lost in transit. Atlas contributes some of her least goosebump-raising vocals on "Just a Prayer", and Sussan Deyhim is sadly underused on a cut from Wobble's pretentious Requiem. That the best cut by far is his duet with Bill Laswell, "Disks Winds and Veiling Curtains", is indicative that something just isn't working, seeing as in its original context (the album Deep Space) it is not the best cut by a longshot. Given the meditative profile of her label, perhaps the compiler was striving to capture the more spiritual essence of Wobble's music, but in doing so has unfortunately robbed it of all dynamic. Compiled June 30, 2001... Thanks, Stephen!

AmbiEntrance © 2001-1997 by David J Opdyke (except CD cover art, rights retained by original owners).