Stephen Fruitman

Rapoon, Obscure Objects of Desire (Vivo)

This album is about yearning, says Robin Storey.

However, he approaches the subject obliquely, opening with ten minutes of abstract, industrial-wasteland Rapoon, hazardous sounding music, zones of ailment. On the third track, "The Emptiness of Institutions", the yearning emerges, and appears to be of the not-uncommon combination of fleshly and spiritual nature. In a dramatically organized three and a half minutes, an operatic female voice pleads, only to be joined by a choir of mixed voices. Both are hard to grasp, the language impossible, but the emotion unmistakeable.

”As Close As Possible” continues in a similar vein, its title hinting at interhuman relationships as much as a kabbalistic longing to come into contact with the godhead, perhaps by ascending through the heirarchy of angels, which the now even more distant choir could well be. Rapoon continues to evolve the album´s beguiling ambiguity with gusts of cosmic wind and the delicate, indecisive twinklings of some sort of plucked or hammered instrument of yore.

”Program Memory” creates an unearthly mood as if scanning the skies for radio broadcasts caught on the points of the stars for centuries. The deftly-looped penultimate track ”Post Mystic” is however far more disquieting, not only for the post-apocalyptic tribalism it conveys, but for the sample of an old man seemingly sputtering out his last words, which inform us that we are ”nothing”.

The final track, making up nearly half the album time, is a devolution from dizzying heights and weightless spinning among space junk, into a fragily human stint on piano. However reassuring, this proves brief and the piece regains percussive momentum as a tour-de-force which sums up, synthesizes and rethinks all we have previously heard.

Storey bedecks the album with life drawings, simple pencil sketches of women. This album deals with more intimate fellings than usual, perhaps more emotion than intellect. And I maintain that the obscure objects are both of this world and far beyond it.

http://www.vivo.pl, http://www.rapoon.net

Strom Noir, Luvyoo (CDR Ambsine Records)

This colourfully-packed CDR opens with "Sunday Soul", captivatingly foreboding and reassuring at once. It could be the sound of a distant foghorn warning sailors away from the rocks far across a slate gray bay. But in actual fact, it is the deep, deep tone of a fujara, a gigantic Slovakian shepherd´s flute.

Ambiguity is the hallmark of Strom Noir´s Luvyoo. Emil Mat´ko has previously garnered plaudits for his drone music, and while certainly not abandoning the template altogether, this new album from the Slovakian is too rich and varied to be as easily classified.

Acoustic guitar features prominently among the electronics in his battery of tools, and the field recordings blended into the mix may be the special ingredient that conveys that sense of ambiguity. Take ”Nothing Really Happens”, in which plenty really happens. Interwoven with desultory strumming and aimless synthesizer, voices, birdsong, and other sounds of unspecified environments rise and fall, leaving the listener uncertain of place – is this a park, the seaside, or are we standing on a railroad station platform? This same feeling of placeless placedness recurs on ”Za Chvíl´u Je Koniec Dňa”.

Five of the eleven tracks stretched over the one-hour playing time have appeared on two previous, limited releases, but everything dovetails as if the fruit of the same brainstorm. Some of the tracks teeter toward the sombre, one even flirts with a hazy industrial electronica, but they tend to regain their equilibrium and remain neither drab gray nor sunny bright, but rather invent and inhabit their own, unique colour scheme.

”PS. I Love You”, which I suppose might as well stand in as the title track, is the prettiest strictly ambient piece on the album and washes over the listener in warm waves. The immediately following ”Quiero Ser Santa”, however, sends a chill down the spine. The album closes with the embracing, aquatic "Heartland", which could easily hold its own as a single, extended ambient album.

http://www.ambsine.sk

Sylvie Walder, Moments (Experimedia)

As a high summer evening darkens without the warm air becoming much less close to the skin, Sylvie Walder´s Moments hang in a thick atmosphere and shift hue and nuance almost imperceptibly. And yet their very inconspicuousness is dazzling.

This is one of the most compelling collections to emerge from the ambitious and polymorphic Experimedia label since its inception. Walder´s ambient bears a soft – dare I say ”feminine?” – touch which makes all the greater impression for it. Proof once again that if you have something really important to say, speak in a whisper and people will strain to hear you.

Although consisting of thirteen relatively brief ”moments”, ranging from one and a half to six minutes in duration, each track bleeds into the next, like the twilight playing on the herd of clouds gracing the cover of this release.

Twenty-eight years old and hailing from Strasbourg, Walder aims at creating what she describes as ”musique intime”, soundtracks of the little world, the small gesture, the memory freighted with meaning and recalled in solitude. No information is provided as to how she goes about creating these opaque masterpieces, though it would appear that she works from the piano outward. Ironcially, the first time it makes itself unabashedly known as ”piano” is midway through on a track entitled ”The Most Abstract to Date”.

The restraint and distinction with which she crafts these miniatures bespeaks an adroitness and maturity bordering on the preternatural. Yet they seem as natural as trees and their leaves. The music of Sylvie Walder belongs here.

http://www.experimedia.net/