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 »

NEST
Retold
SERE001
Serein Limited 2010
11 Tracks. 54mins45secs

Boomkat: CD

Five years ago, Norwegian duo Deaf Center released an EP, Neon City, and an album, Pale Ravine, on Type, which defined the dawn of a new era in electronic music, one influenced by classical music and sombre atmospherics. Much has been written and said about the consequent work of one half of the pair, Erik Skodvin, as both head of the seminal Miasmah imprint and for his solo projects, most prominently Svarte Greiner. Otto A. Totland on the other hand has remained more elusive, with no known projects apart for Nest, a collaborative project with British music Huw Roberts. The pair released an eponymous debut digital EP on Roberts’ Serein imprint in 2007.

The appropriately titled Retold, the first CD release on Serein, compiles the six tracks from the original Nest EP and five new compositions. Continue Reading »