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 | Lull:Moments (Release - 1998) 99 individual tracks which, when listened to sequentially form one smoothly flowing, though evolving and spooky, atmosphere... or, when subjected to the whims of your CD player's Random/Shuffle mode, the whole is broken into 99 discordant shards. |
| Not a stranger to creating ambient soundworlds, Mick Harris has worked within several experimental sound projects, such as Scorn, Divination and Napalm Death. With his solo project Lull, Harris is focusing on low-frequency drones that one can actually feel. Moments incorporates a shifting array of deeply resonating timbres that pass through many styles.
Most of the 99 fragments are less than one-minute in length, ranging from 5 seconds (track 28) to the comparatively lengthy closing piece, track 99, at 2:42. This disc definitely is NOT going to get the usual AmbiEntrance track-by-track treatment! In "normal" listening mode, when Moments plays as one continual piece, it slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, morphs from one "moment" to the next. Beginning as a lightly buzzing electronic drone which then becomes more shimmery, the sonic zones change and change again, though always retaining a darkly impassive air. At one point, the heat is turned up, sounding as if the section were recorded within a slow-boiling industrial cauldron. Things go more droney again, highlighted by a left-right pan beginning around Track 20 which evolves into a mechanical roar. Higher frequencies fade in with track 30 while the background sounds like distant jet. Other passages sound like reverberations from some infernal factory, or like a swirl of elongated echoes, or like unknown machinery operating far down an unlit corridor. Sometimes loud and powerful; other times soft and lulling, the unidentifiable sounds flow in a textbook example of ambient music. No frills, no beat, no samples... just a long, metamorphic soundscape. And if that's not enough for you, the extra fun begins when you hit your CD player's shuffle mode and the 99 shards are strung together in a totally new fashion every time; the pieces are arbitrarily repositioned, making for jarring transitions from one phase to the next, like being helplessly flung from one dark, alien world to another. Cool! I thrill to the random generation factor, but am slightly disappointed with the eighth-of-a-second silence that cuts between the snippets in this mode. I suppose it's an unavoidable consequence, or perhaps it's just my CD player; I'll learn to live with it, as the thought of infinite possible arrangements excites me. (I realize this technique is not new; I believe it's been done before with Otomo Yoshihide's Night Before The Death Of The Sampling Virus, for instance...)
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| If you're especially keen on the randomization factor, buying Moments is like buying 9,801 CDs in one! (though somebody might want to check my math on that...) and if the reshuffled effect isn't your bag, you've still got one very worthwhile soundscape courtesy of Lull! I'm raising Both Thumbs... one for the Big Picture, and one for the rearranged pieces!
For more Lull and other dark ambient sounds, see the Hallowe'en Overviews. |  |
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