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Jeff Pearce: Daylight Slowly (Hypnos - 1998) Jeff Pearce seemed to get a kick when, in the 1998 AmbiEntrance Top 10, I called his transmogrified guitar sounds from Vestiges "deliciously drifting sound ooze"... Well, expect more ooze with Daylight Slowly, though in these earlier pieces, the source material often is more readily discernible. That doesn't detract from a good listen to the amazing (yet smooth) manipulations that can be made to a relatively "normal" sound. |
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Slowly rolling clouds resonate with a strange Inner light to open this collection of re-released material. Definite guitar sounds form Spirals, and sustain from the ringing strings hangs in a lush haze. The layers which phase into Cloud Water Rising accumulate as dense, sometimes almost shrill, strata. This track (and the next) suffers slightly from a rather abrupt cut-off. A dreamy, jangly, somehow Oriental-ish shimmer overrides the deep twists and turns leading through Labyrinth.
Quiet and Clear opens to strings and horn-like flow interlaced with gentle picking, to a New-Agey effect. A smoother drift flows from The Broken Places as radiant sonic fluid seems to spill like a copious stream of molten gold. Sinuous and silky, intertwining strands of hyperextended tones luxuriate for the10.5 minute drift of Known Presence. Extremely smooth sailing here. Blowing in from warmer climes, Delta retains just a hint of twang in its seamless sheets of sound. Lovely! When traveling Through Darkened Halls, any spooky implications from the title are not so evident. A nocturnal, but safe, journey. Plucking through a hazy dreamstate, 11/11 is a slow convergence of both straightforward playing and floating echoes. Beautiful and intriguing, Inner Storms isn't necessarily stormy, though there is a latent power surging with potential danger underneath the otherwise tranquil sheets. Gentle criss-crossing metallic strands seem to span the dawning airwaves in Daylight Slowly (2:07), which fades away rather too soon. Passage to Home (20:22), on the other hand, takes its own sweet time. Your mental canvas is given free reign here. Could be crimson topped clouds over a scenic mountain panorama... could be a luxuriously whorling vortex in some glowing, alien ocean... at any rate, it's another welcome dose of amorphous guitar ooze. |
| For more than 72 minutes, sinuous soundwaves from Jeff Pearce's guitar will entwine themselves around your world. Daylight Slowly can be seen as a stepping stone toward what has become Pearce's defining sound. I bestow a hearty 7.7 upon this new collection of older material.
For more ambient guitar sounds, see also this months coverage of David Tollefson's newest, new eyes on the universe. |  |