Coriolis is the first solo album by Tarl Broad-Ashman. Once a member in an indie guitar band, Broad-Ashman started writing ambient music in the mid nineties. Naming German electronic pioneer Klaus Schulze as one of his main influences, Broad-Ashman soon teamed up with a couple of friends to form Innerise, but left the band after just one live performance, retaining the name in the process. After a couple of remixes done for friends, Tarl started working on some tracks for Innerise with a vocalist, while developing at the same time a new project called Ti-Cal, devoted to extreme ambient. Recorded at the end of last year, Coriolis is the third release from London-based Council Of Nine.
Listening to Coriolis, there are some obvious connections between Tarl’s vaporous soundscapes and those assembled by Biosphere’s Geir Jenssen. But, unlike Jenssen, Tarl’s music is entirely based on artificially generated analogues and digital sounds. Coriolis is articulated around five phases, ranging from just over seven minutes for Phase 3 to twelve and a half minutes for Phase 4, each one in turn built around long swathes of slowly evolving warm waves. The only remotely rhythmic elements in these beatless sequences are provided by the endless ebbs and flows of the music, or the occasional insertion of revolving sonic components. The sole perceptible external interference on this album is a human voice sample that emerges from the sea of calm of Phase 4 for a while before disappearing for good. Coriolis sees Ti-Cal experimenting with textural soundscapes to develop a seamless journey between the two ends of this record, each track eventually merging into the next, creating a smooth ambient piece of work.
Of his own admission, Tarl Broad-Ashman considers ambient music as an essential element of his life, something he likes creating, listening to and sleeping to. This first album is a perfect expression of this. Ti-Cal offers here beautiful dreamy and intense soundscapes, reflecting a good musical maturity, proving that the genre generate some very interesting artists indeed.