HARUKI
To Humble A Nest
LND008
The Land Of 2009
09 Tracks. 40mins15secs

‘All music by Haruki. Sounds from everywhere and nowhere’. This is the introduction to To Humble A Nest, the latest record to be released by relatively new imprint The Land Of, a small label with a particular interest for music made from, or incorporating, all sorts of field recordings. Splashed out all over the cover, these few words sum up the music collected inside. Haruki is Boris Snauwaert, a musician hailing from Gent, Belgium who has, over the last few years, released a number of CDR and MP3 albums and contributed remixes for My Brightest Diamond, Au Revoir Simone and Machinefabriek amongst others.

With To Humble A Nest, Snauwaert creates a somewhat complex and intriguing piece where field recordings and acoustic and electronic instruments are articulated into often pretty bare experimental compositions. Each sound appears to have its own purpose here, independently of its provenance or its state in the recording. Processed or left untouched, they all contribute to the claire-obscure atmosphere carefully laid out by Snauwaert, and while there is no apparent thread running through the whole record, the tone is pretty uniform throughout, making this a very consistently evocative collection. Snauwaert blends his sounds into delicately ornate abstract vignettes where a solitary piano or guitar occasionally emerge from the sonic mass to hang in the air for a moment, before disappearing again, melted back into the droney backdrop, while ambient noises add grain and texture to the various pieces on offer. These, although often slightly to the back of the mix, are key to the consistence of the fabric of this record. Street noises, voices calling in the distance, a pinball machine, clattering cutlery, the grey hum of an electrical appliance… these all, or could, materialise at some point or other, at times clearly identifiable, at other much more obscure and mysterious, each adding its own tone to the work and binding it closer together.

At times, the electro-acoustic experimentations of To Humble Nest place this album resolutely in avant-garde territory, occasionally reminiscent of the complex formations of Icarus or some of the sonic excursions heard on labels such as Spekk, 12K or Touch. A dense yet refined collection, where intricate layers grow into surprisingly bare and minimal pieces, To Humble A Nest is full of contradictions, but it is also a thoroughly enjoyable record, which shows Haruki as one of the rising talents of the genre.

4.4/5

Haruki (MySpace) | The Land Of