VARIOUS ARTISTS
2 | Favourite Places
AB026
Audiobulb Records 2009
10 Tracks. 56mins30secs

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The concept is pretty simple: take a number of contemporary musicians with a taste for moods and atmospheres, task them with recording sounds from their favourite places in the world and use them in a composition. This is exactly what David Newman, head of Audiobulb, did two years ago, and the result was compiled in the first instalment of Favourite Places, with contributions from Biosphere, Taylor Deupree, Claudio, Leafcutter John and John Kannenberg amongst others. The second volume in the collection brings together musicians from the UK (Michael Santos, Icarus, Autistici, Calika), Australia (Lawrence English), Belgium (Yannick Franck), Japan (Sawako), USA (Jeremy Bible, He Can Jog) and Canada (Michael Trommer), giving them each a chance to introduce their very own favourite place. The booklet accompanying this CD contains photographs and a description of these spots, providing concrete complements to the recordings.

The locations selected vary greatly here, ranging from the South Downs between London and Brighton (in two instances), a derelict concrete factory in Ohio, a forest near Brisbane, to a suburban Belgian town, a public walkway in North London, a bedroom in Brooklyn, or the Peak District National Park near Sheffield, yet, perhaps due to the very nature of the project and of the artists involved, there are great sonic consistency throughout the record. Apart for He Can Jog’s Erik Schoster who uses his bed as his source location, the other nine artists use outdoors settings as the starting point for their respective contributions, feeding sounds ranging from wind sweeping though landscapes or birdsongs to running water, rain or distant traffic noises into densely atmospheric collages where music often occurs as an impressionist counterpoint.

This especially the case on Lawrence English’s opening Quiet Planigale, which originally seems to catalogue all sorts of birdsongs but eventually gives way to a sombre drone over which lighter fragments of hazy melody take shape, or on Michael Santos’s Perfect Pitch, where field recordings, collected along Parkland Walk, between Finsbury Park and Highgate, occupy solely the first segment of the track, before outstretched chimes come in, arranged as to evoke light playing through branches and leaves. Autistici’s Winter Heather, Frozen Breath works on a similar concept, David Newman originally focusing on a walk through the vast spaces of the Peak District National Park before bringing in gently shimmering sounds to convey an element of the wide open space serving as inspiration for the track. It is also the format adopted by Michael Trommer on his portrayal of Toronto’s underground pedestrian network for TD Path 6. To complement the urban setting of the opening two and a half minute, Trommer distils a haunting and dense series of soundscapes in the remaining section of the track, crystallising the transient aspect of the paths network and its anonymity in a surprisingly vivid way.

Icarus take the concept into a different direction by intricately linking the sounds recorded on the South Downs (football commentaries on a portable radio, human voices, insects, car noises) and the music they extract from them, articulating these two phases against each other. This is also partially the case with He Can Jog’s extremely clever Woodbine Entwist, although producing a radically different result. Here, the bed, and by extension the bedroom, is integrant part of the song, not so much through the sounds used as through the low-fi approach to the colourful electronically-tainted folk that develops from the experiment, a reminder that the music was recorded in his own living space.

Like its predecessor, this second volume of Favourite Places collects sounds and impressions, and reflects the choices made by the various contributors. Frequently characteristic of their usual work, these tracks are like open windows into the inspiration of musicians, giving an interesting, if often highly unusual and personal, insight into their intimate spaces.

4.4/5

Audiobulb Records
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VARIOUS ARTISTS
Ambient Not Not Ambient
ADR069
Audio Dregs 2008
17 Tracks. 74mins55secs

In The Ambient Century, writer Mark Prendergast finds elements of ambient music in artists and groups as diverse as The Byrds, Madonna, and (unsurprisingly) Brian Eno. While the most common aural association with the term “ambient” involves gentle synthesizers and reverb, the musical concept reaches a far wider scope. Ambient music can be with or without beats, vocals, traditional instruments, tones, or repetitive structure; all it really requires is a depth that can either be ignored or focused upon, without a clear detriment to the listening experience.

The myriad possibilities inherent in ambient music are smattered across the diverse, engaging contributions to Ambient Not Not Ambient. Eschewing the lo-fi glitch-dance sound most often associated with Audio Dregs, this newest offering features contributions from artists within and without its stable. It’s a gamble to put acts as different as Baltimore psych-noise makers WZT Hearts and Skam favorite Freeform together on the same compilation, but the result is a richly rewarding mosaic of cerebral sounds.

The first track is perhaps the most challenging piece in the collection, as E*Vax, taking a break from electro-rockers Ratatat, presents Awl, a two-minute piece of what sounds like ringing sine wave drones, gracefully going nowhere in particular. As with most ambient music, however, it’s the journey, not the destination, that counts. A few tracks later is Less Of Everything, by Bird Show, one of the release’s many highlights. After a softly disorienting introduction incorporating high-pitched horn samples, Less morphs into a gentle progression of warm chimes supporting a resigned vocal performance. This section, joined by a heavily delayed guitar line, closes out the track, and demonstrates the crossroads between repetitive indie-folk and ambient musics.

It’s obvious that a good deal of thought went into the sequencing on Ambient. Such a long-running compilation of ambient music could easily turn into dismissive wallpaper, but here, every new track brings a different attribute to the fold, such that the listener is constantly reevaluating the music. Nudge’s Dayrise plays like a more concise and fleeting Windy and Carl drone, laden with ascending guitar riffs and flat, airy bass. Following this is Even As We Here, by AM/PM, anchored in a quarter-note bass beat, and gradually developing into an ambient techno epic reminiscent of Detroit second-wavers Kenny Larkin and Carl Craig. Likewise, the dense percussion and menacing wall of sound on WZT Hearts’ Discuss Winter is followed by a break with Sawako’s Nst, built out of distant music box chimes.

Ambient successfully captures both the settling and unsettling possibilities of such minimally progressing music. E*Rock’s Exexpat is an unnerving meditation of hollow synths and tenderly pained shouts, while the rapid audio dicing on Lucky Dragons’ Sayles Street Ok Ok sounds oddly celebratory. Contrary to some ambient music, Ambient Not Not Ambient refuses to be ignored, but in the best possible way: excellent contributions and flawless (and definitely not seamless) sequencing grab the listener at each track. It only figures that it’s taken years to put together Ambient, as it’s an exercise in perfection down to the last minute detail.

5/5

Audio Dregs
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