OLAN MILL
Pine
SERE002
Serein Limited 2010
10 Tracks. 34mins45secs

Amazon UK: CD | DLD US: CD | DLD

If ambient music can be a tricky genre to tackle, Alex Smalley and Svitlana Samoylenko, the duo forming Olan Mill, have negotiated the hurdle of their first collaborative ambient record extremely well. The second CD release on Welsh label Serein, following Nest’s Retold album earlier this year, Pine was recorded in a small church, but instead of relying on electronic textures and field recordings, Olan Mill work with a somewhat restricted set of acoustic instruments. Throughout the record, one can ear in turn echoes of a piano, a violin, a pipe organ, a guitar, but these are often wrapped in dense layers of reverb, their respective edges blurred, their attack soften, their decay prolonged almost to infinity, to create rich and vivid organic sonic spaces. Continue Reading »