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Reviews:
The Steinberg Principle, Euan McMeeken
Had I put together a list of my top EPs of 2010 then this one would, without doubt, top the lot. I’d even rate it ahead of ‘Riser’ by Fieldhead, which, if you know this blog, pretty much sums up how I feel about this piece of music. And I’ve only just recently received it as well. Which, again, says a lot about the impact that this music has had on me.
On a slight tangent, but bare with me, Satellite for Entropy is a blog, which I have grown very fond of reading. I think the writing on that blog is something truly special. So much so, that on a number of occasions I have found myself not writing about a piece of music simply because nothing I could write would come close to describing the music in the way that Angie has already. Take ‘A Young Persons Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn’ for example. It’s a piece of music I had planned to write about because it’s excellent. That was until I stumbled upon Angie’s post about the record. So, instead of me trying to express what is so important about that record, I suggest that you go here and enjoy her words instead.
However, I am using the words from that piece of writing to try and bring clarity to my own thoughts and allow me to express what it is about this particular piece of music that just leaves me a little breathless. And that’s exactly what it does. Leaves me breathless.
You know that way when you’re watching a really beautiful film, reading a wonderful book or even at a concert and you’re scared to blink or breathe in case you miss a single moment? Well that’s how I feel when I listen to this record. It’s about 40 minutes long, it sucks you in and it is over before you know it or want it to be. All good music should be. When all the component parts come together perfectly I think you should feel like you’ve been on a wonderful journey. And more than that, you should feel that the breathlessness you’ve felt; the fear to blink or breathe or move, has not been a success. Like you’ve missed something important. And the first thing you should want to do is go back to the start and listen all over again so that this time you take it all in and miss not one second of beauty.
I think it’s the subtlety in ambient music which brings it to life. It’s a bit like writing a story in many ways (maybe). You have to control the pace of a piece. You have to find the right rhythm at the right time. You have to draw the listener in and keep them in. And when the word ‘minimalism’ is involved it really becomes all about the subtle moments throughout a piece.
I’ve talked about it before. Ambient music tends to set a stage and build the characters as it goes along. Cory Allen, in 4 songs has created a perfect piece of ambience that starts slowly, builds to a wonderful crescendo on, my, stand out track ‘Isozaki Clouds’ and finishes in a lovely warm haze. ‘Pearls’ is a masterful piece of music by a young American who you really should check out if you get a moment. And you should check out his record label Quiet Design also because they are releasing some wonderful things at the moment. My next review will confirm that for you.
The Liminal, Scott McMillan
The final leg of my return from my Christmas break had me catching a train back to London from Leeds. The snow that had been covering the country for much of the festive period seemed to have turned into a icy, foggy suspension, hiding the Yorkshire countryside from view. It felt eerily still, particularly with headphones in; only a faint mechanical chunter told me that I was in fact travelling. My attention was caught, however, by the occasional sudden appearance of a tree through the haze, its blackness picked out against the brooding grey behind. And another, hard edges amongst soft textures. And another, crisp shapes contrasted against a diffuse background. Gradually, I found the album I was listening to on those headphones, Pearls by Cory Allen, and the outside world, were seeping into one another, it was as if the pure tones were becoming immersed in the fog, and the trees were emerging from static. The sounds adding new colour to the sights, and the sights adding fresh harmony to the sounds.
A happy accident of time and place, surely. However, accident isn’t a word that is used often in describing the work of Cory Allen. There is a reason the label he jointly runs with Mike Vermusky is called Quiet Design, after all. Allen’s solo work for the label has tended towards the scientific, being formulated from precisely measured combinations of ambient textures and tones, carefully set up to experiment with notions of perception. The range of frequencies he uses, so I’ve read, even include the imperceptible, the ultrasonic. You clearly aren’t supposed to engage with this on all levels, all of the time. His last album, Hearing Is Forgetting The Name Of The Thing One Hears, was a collection of glistening sine waves inspired by a neighbour’s set of wind chimes; always there, always musical, always beautiful, but somehow not always noticed, drifting in and out of aural focus. Ambient music in the sense that Eno would approve of, as ignorable as it is interesting in its own right.
Allen’s new release Pearls is similarly unassuming, but it is a sonically richer experience, full of contrasts. Acoustic and electronic. The light and the dark. The real and the unreal. “Strange Birds” rolls sleepily down from the hill at dawn and immediately diverges. The tension of a pulsing river of glitchy static is broken by delicate Fender Rhodes droplets, soft minimal melodies playing on the surface, becoming increasingly diffuse with each rippling repetition. Throughout the track, and the album as a whole, a slow undercurrent of bass notes tries to drag you out of your seat and into its fluid depths; the combination of frequencies, as well as the meticulousness of their assembly, reminding me of the electronic constructions of Oren Ambarchi.
While initially it feels still, you begin to perceive the sensation of slow movement, of calculated progression. The tracks run into one another, those recurring bass and Rhodes sounds leaking across the divides, pushing you almost imperceptibly forward into new misty landscapes which are shy about revealing their beauty. As well as sharing sounds with each other, the tracks trade them with the outside world; at the end of the album is a field recording of sorts, as if someone has accidentally called you when their mobile phone is in their pocket, and you are listening in to them going about their crackly business. You find yourself tuning out from your world and into theirs, these dislocated sounds distracting you from the wondrous scenery: the ruined majesty of “Isoyazi Clouds” with its looped, greyed-out classical samples is only gradually apparent, as if it is approached by train through the fog. Or, quite possibly, via some other means. You probably don’t need to invest in a ticket to/from Leeds to get the most from Pearls. It will add a delightful tint to your environment, wherever you are.
Was Ist Das
'Pearls' seems an apt title for an album of ambient so perfect, so digital that it has become a sort of artistic engineering achievement.
The four extended tracks that make up the album present a rich yet gentle tapestry of sound. At times it is minimalist but at other parts of the same track the mix becomes more layered, although losing none of it's subtlety.
This album is one of those that resonates with the surroundings. As I write, rain began to fall gently on the skylight, the sound incorporated beautifully into the album. Although presented as four tracks, the transition is not always noticeable as the music carefully evolves through phases rather than jumps track. 'Pearls' is a rewarding album full of wonder, detail and atmosphere.
If you are after perfectly crafted experimental music, look no further.
Future Sequence
Austin, Texas based experimental artist Cory Allen follows up previous releases 'The Fourth Way' and 'Hearing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Hears' with meditative ambient album 'Pearls' on his own co-founded label Quiet Design.
Saturated atmospherics of subtle microsounds resonate through the four tracks, each creating a sweetly toned landscape, with an undercurrent of tension, delivered through the presence of static noise, occasional minor notes, a background feeling that all is not well.
'Strange Birds' locates the listener within a mileu of worn static noise, and chiming bells suggesting a Japanese influence through the choice of notes. 'Isozaki Clouds' also could be a reference of the Japanese modernist architect of the same name - you can imagine the lighter than air metallic structures meticulously described through the piece. 'Blue Eyes' settles the heart and mind, with its rising bassline, providing a cadence to both the track and album.
Whilst still very electronic - combining static and worn field recordings that hum like a power generator - Pearls stays true to an observation of nature, weaving a layered surrounding environment. You can almost hear the sand eroding the surface of the pearls, the mother of pearl blues and greens glistening.
Igloo Magazine, Alan Lockett
When Austin, TX-based experimentalist Cory Allen called his new album Pearls, the hint of allusion to Budd/Eno’s The Pearl was perhaps unconscious, but not insignificant. Promo discourse refers to exploration of ‘existential landscape,’ which, as it turns out, needn’t prompt any angst-ridden posture, for Allen’s existentialism doesn’t translate into Dark Ambient isolationist brow-furrowing so much as (post-)Budd-ist meditational. Following up previous releases, The Fourth Way and Hearing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Hears, Pearls is less conceptually indulgent than the latter, less liable to software-driven ravages than the former, and ultimately more satisfyingly realised.
Not for nothing is Allen’s imprint designated Quiet Design. Pearls is quiet indeed, yet is far from the flaccid pacifier generically envisioned at the mention of ‘ambient‘. Designed it most certainly is, though, in that, for all ambient’s eschewal of narrative, and the vagaries of its trajectory, it has the feel of something defined and developed over its four texturally related but distinct tracks. Allen generally limits himself to warm Rhodes-like keyboard tones and quiet sine waves, upon a grainy carpet of static – with varying degrees of pile. After the more difficult listening of The Fourth Way and the neo-Zen philosophical bent of Hearing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Hears, the basics of music qua music are fully attended to over its four slow flow movements. Predominantly held in, contracted, then let out by degrees in stately expansionist gestures before being pared back again, opener “Strange Birds” set s the tone: dusty roads over which dusky Rhodes rides, or slow decay surfaces grazed by crackle rippling over a granular blur-pool. Sometimes a languorous undercurrent of dark bass pull. An initial feeling of stasis soon shifts in slow dissolves: “Lost Energizer” feels more aqueous, as if adrift; though its waters are not dark, there are undercurrents. “Isozaki Clouds” is further unmoored, denser synth pads – a suggestion of etiolated classical samples – and bassy drone currents, chimes coming to lighten late in the day.
Overall, Allen finely poises Pearls between minimalist thrift and neo-romantic drift. Its delicate gossamer sound-design is balanced by an endowment of something weightier; accretions of subtle microsounds are offset with a certain liminal dissonance, a sense that the air of calm is attended by a certain unease lurking at the edges. On the final “Blue Eyes” peripheral noise is reconfigured into a different design, the hail/hale of static and melodies more ex- than in-, mounting bass vectors providing a rich underpinning for a graceful cadence, as if tension were relenting, and something in the existential landscape might be moving towards resolution.
Textura.org
Pearls is Austin-based electronic composer and Quiet Design co-owner and manager Cory Allen's follow-up to his Hearing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Hears. Ostensibly labeled modern ambient, the new recording is hardly wallpaper music, even if there is a becalmed quality to it, as Allen builds the sounds deployed into a texturally rich and dense mass that's hardly stripped-down. Presented as four connecting movements, the material undergoes slow metamorphoses as it mutates over its concise thirty-six-minute running time. No instrumentation or technical details are included on the packaging—Allen presumably wishing the material to speak for itself—but related text clarifies that his production approach involves working with computer algorithms, processed electronic sounds, complex sine tones, and acoustic instruments, among other things.
In the opening sections “Strange Birds” and “Lost Energizer,” bright, pearl-like baubles (suggestive of electric piano) meander against a droning backdrop whose overlapping layers expand and contract and whose elements weave together into a thick, opaque coagulate; the fine-tuned focus Allen applies to the sonic definition of the materials used is exceptional, as attested to by the repeated blip of a signal and the cross-channel shuffle of a textural smear during the opening section. In the shimmering final section, “Blue Eyes,” placid bass tones and willowy atmospheres appear alongside a crackling haze that's suggestive of a fireplace. There's an eloquence to Allen's material which Pearls brings into sharp focus during its patient unfolding. Everything seems to arrive at its proper time and place, neither too slow nor too fast, and the gradual crescendo that the third section, “Isozaki Clouds,” works so subtly towards is merely one example of many captured on this fine outing.
Vital Weekly, FDW
Allen calls this 'dreamy and transcendent world of modern ambient music'. How very true that is. Whatever it is that Allen uses - me thinks a Max/msp patch with field recordings, listening to these sustained sounds and crackling, fire like sounds - he plays it very well. Quiet indeed, letting sounds die out beyond their sustain, while overlaying with other events, so that everything bumps and collides in seemingly random ways. The four tracks seem to be linked together through the sounds used - the fire crackle as I wrote it down - and the somewhat identical methods of processing. It makes a wonderful work of indeed modern ambient music. Perhaps all in the digital domain but with some great warmth to it, much needed on a cold winter's day.
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