Slowcraft / KrysaliSound
James Murray set up Slowcraft Records back in 2011 to enable him to release his drifting passages of ambience, as well as highlighting other artists with a similar approach. His latest, Embrace Storms, numbered and limited to 150 copies and released in association with KrysaliSound, is a further variation on the theme of distance and dissolution.
The two pieces here are based on drones and drift by like half-remembered dreams, swelling and dissipating like the sounds from distant spacecraft endlessly rotating, orbiting just out of view. Everything is at a remove, as if huge distances are being conveyed. At points a beat forms, sticky with sleep and a xylophone is half-heard, cocooned in cotton wool. The beats drift away again, scarcely noticed, and gauzey keyboard lines are left, decaying like an ancient piece of machinery, steam powered in this space-age.
You can’t really fix on anything as there is no obvious detail. It is like sunlight seen through eyelids as you doze off in the middle of a field in summertime, then awakening to distant noises too abstract to immediately comprehend. You might be laying next to a railway with the drone of the horns and the slow process of the rolling stock moving over points filtering into your subconscious. There is a submerged heartbeat that kind of enlivens the second piece and merges with a harsh tone that surfaces and then is submerged again like a barnacle-covered whale far from home. The other sounds in juxtaposition are so like cotton wool, it is as if there are duvets over the speakers; but they do become more vibrant as the track passes. Gnawing subtly at your unconscious thoughts with surprising jagged rifts and metallic ringing that draw you back from the edge, before the whole thing finally slips from view and you are left looking around, wondering if the whole things really was a dream.These well-constructed dreams are immersive experiences and it is well worth contacting Slowcraft to snap one up before they all go.
-Mr Olivetti-
