Jeff Karsin: Pandataria Jeff Karsin: Pandataria (Jeff Karsin - 2000) If you're not already surrounded by flat, icy expanses, here's another opportunity to be so encompassed... Jeff Karsin has constructed the plains of Pandataria not to rock your world, but rather to enshroud it in the mystical shimmer and sheen of ephemerally hovering shades and hues. Eight softly droning pieces (mastered by master Robert Rich) add up to 71.5 minutes of shapeless listening. Lightly billowing clouds spread from horizon to horizon as Sailing with Inner (14:17) journeys across its foggy vastness; flat-lined chords drones hazily into the distances. Multi-toned mists drift over spacious nothingness, their chiming resonance evoking the primordial beginnings of Creatures that May. Inscrutable activities of electric/metallic natures seem to be occuring underneath the fogbank of Dust Minion. Wispy tendrils spiral out from a gaseous core, continually brushed by the breezing energies of Pandataria (5:05) (and no, that's not where the pandas line up to get their lunches... that's the pandateria... somebody stop me, please...). Eerie streams of faint dissonance flow from the creepily-titled Apple From a Dead Pig's Mouth. The disc closes on the slurry gauze sheets of Sailing with Outer; barely noticable undulations warp their radiating surface which fades into silence. Tonal drones aplenty... Jeff Karsin's Pandataria exists in a self-created world of amorphously levitating sounds. Many will find these less-than-action-packed tapestries work best as wallpaper, which with all their simmering vagueness, they do admirably. An 8.3 floatation. This review posted December 30, 2000 AmbiEntrance © 2000-1997 by David J Opdyke (except CD cover art, rights retained by original owners).