Frequency Domain
For the second volume of Partials, only a couple of the artists from the previous release make a return visit, leaving the way open for plenty of fresh artists doing their bit for this fantastic cause. Once again, it is a real chill-fest, the majority of tracks happily nestled into the drifting ambient side of things, with only a few adopting beats and allowing the vibe of the album to change slightly from time to time.
Shasta Cults‘ “Sine Waves With Subtle Phase” does exactly as its title suggests and opens the album perfectly with a slow lament of a drone that drifts gently with very little movement, drawing the listener into a world without deadlines and schedules, a world where the only pace is your pulse as it settles into a gradual descent. Jo Johnson‘s “Careless” sparkles with a little more activity, but still the overall sense is calm and its slow-moving backdrop is the perfect description in muted colours of the wonder of space; but space can have its darker moments, and Warmsore‘s “One Million Suns” errs on the more turbulent side, with darker sounds lurking like worlds collapsing light years away. Patrick R Park‘s “Another Dawn” is the first to employ beats, but they are of the early morning variety with celestial drones hovering in the background.
At this point, the listener is definitely seduced by the overall tone and conscious of the fact that nothing will be shaking them from their skybound reverie, even the PiL-like hollow dub experiment of Spatial‘s “Bombe Dub” with its leaden Jah Wobble-like beat and metallic interference is similar to someone playing with an oscilloscope and sending pulse beams through the speakers. A few of the tracks use the reassuring sounds of waves and rain, like the romantically desolate “Crestfallen” from returning Southfacing, and Datassette‘s drowsier and more intimate “Overtone Crystal”. The simplicity and minimalism of some of the tracks is a real treat; the slow but adventurous search over unknown terrain of Ali Wade‘s “Chrono Synclastic Infundibulum” allows the (in vain) stasis of Ekoplekz‘s “Aviary Unheimlich” even greater aural effect. The one track that doesn’t really fit in is the delightful strummed guitar and coconut rhythm of Negra Branca‘s “Importa”. The dreamy female vocals are the only obvious human connection on the album, and a subtly welcome intrusion into this land of isolation before the album drifts to a close. The wide-eyed electronic wandering of Plant43‘s “Comet Chaser” drifts into the glitch speaker test of Paperbark‘s “Walk Through Them At Night” and finally the solitary, pregnant piano notes of closer “Between Worlds” from Constantine ft. Christos Sakellaridis. This is a perfect farewell, a duet for piano and barely present guitar, the lovely decay of the former contrasting with the sparse scrape of the latter, leading to a doomed finale, the pining for something lost that leaves us blinking into the light after this drifting journey.All the profits for this release go towards the Eden Reforestation Projects. Have a look and buy the album, because every home should have something like this to send you to another place — and if it is doing good at the same time, that can only be a good thing.
-Mr Olivetti-
