| |||||
 |
David Tollefson: new eyes on the universe (Hypnos - 1998) David Tollefson is an ambient guitarist, though many of the sounds you'll hear on new eyes on the universe don't sound very "normal" for the old six-string. Forget typical guitar-associated sounds from picking, strumming or chording, though those things can occasionally be discerned beneath the layers of drift and drone. Mike Griffin of Hypnos adds his own treatments to Tollefson's sounds. |
|
Awakening like living tendrils of morning mist, the thin strands which open palomar (7:29) grow into organ-like billows, textured with hints of electric grit. Distant feedback is perceptible, though the overall effect is delightfully alien.
With strange menace, painted sky offers a twisted, burbly, windy (and short) atmosphere... alienating yet intriguing. some light from the heavens, as implied, is less disconcerting, as it basks in a slow, shimmery pulse which fades and floats.
Take another relaxing jaunt with phase (travel); a fuzzy undercurrent is stroked with synth like strings and almost recognizable guitar.
The dense echoes and bell-like reverberations within tempel seem to emanate from some extraterrestrial cathedral
Slightly noisier, industrial-ish textures give empyrean an edgier, machinistic feel. Spacy shimmers highlight vanishing lines 1 wherein resonant string-sounds are embellished with sharp feedback strains. The piece glitters like some self-illuminated alien entity. Another short foray, you are almost there sounds rather like a violin and cello duet, though more abstract. A faint, crystalline strumming leads the way to vanishing lines 2, jangling over sweltering clouds and sonic flow. voien (1:36) includes some fairly musical moments, buried in its unfortunately brief, murky lifespan. A musical almost-still life, movement within a frame is marked by placidly rolling waves; another quite short piece. A sense of yearning seems to imbue the soft washes of planetal with shapeless melancholia. Simply lovely stuff. mandala is beautiful too, though in an entirely different way... a celestial exercise in empty space drift, rocket hum, and the faraway squall of the void. Hazily building layers of mutated strings gather into imminent departure, fading as the track exits, leaving behind the delicious rumbling of new eyes on the universe, a final otherworldly excursion. For more amorphous guitar works, please refer also to this months coverage of Jeff Pearce's newest, Daylight Slowly. |
| Clocking in at just over an hour, new eyes on the universe transmutes the dross of plain old electric guitar sounds into flowing distortions of gold. The only complaint I can make about David Tollefson's works here is my opinion that several of the tracks were regrettably short. Gorgeously soothing sounds, with just enough strangeness to keep them especially interesting. High marks to these eyes... 9.1! |  |