Stephen Fruitman

Alio Die & Luciano Daini, End of an Era (Hic Sunt Leones)

Alio Die works more often than not with collaborators who share his aesthetic sense as well as nationality. In this way, and by giving them equal billing, he and his label Hic Sunt Leones provide an invaluable showcase where the rest of the world can discover a whole slew of relatively unknown ambient artists from Italy.

It is also interesting, as we see the mature Alio Die´s career evolve, to see him relegate electronics to the back seat, increasingly choosing instead to generate his drones and soundscapes with acoustic instruments.

This album is a cross between a kind of pan-global ethnic sound - all those wind instruments - and an almost sacral, late Medieval feeling - had he been born five hundred years ago, Alio Die would no doubt have composed for the church.

Luciano Daini´s cello lends the title track an essential focal point to an otherwise abstract setting that sounds like things quietly falling apart, or gently being pulled apart by angels. Of course the end of any one era means the beginning of another - by the time we reach this point on the album, we´re still only a third of the way through.

The next phase of the album is introduced with a whiff of Arabian "Desert´s Breath", which heralds "Il Volo Assunto", featuring the album´s most exquisite textures. While "L´Inequivocabile Quintessenza" rambles too much (ambient improv gone astray), the closing track "Nocturnal Solution" brings us in for a very soft and pleasant landing.

Various Artists, Resonant Embers (Edition Sonoro)

Resonant Embers is the first release by Edition Sonoro, a classy-looking statement of intent featuring "a selection of sonorous music" by four well-known artists, two less-well know ones (one of whom deserves to be much better known) and a newcomer. The entire presentation and synaesthetic title misled me first to believe that this would be a compilation of drone music but there is far too much going on to be able to classify these sonorities under the rubric of slowly evolving drone.

Instead we have typical experimental electronics generated mostly by computerized processing combined with dashes of musique concrete - as in Jgrzinich´s "Animate Structures No. 1", in which wire strings and hollow tubs seem to be getting kicked around and generally abused.

I have never been the best judge of such music, because I find that the incidents occurring in the foreground detract from my enjoyment of what very well may be some truly luminous backgrounds. A distinction is made here by Ubeboet, whose "Agone" showcases a (played as intended, not abused) violin around which he creates a shimmering nimbus around it. He´s the one who deserves a much larger audience.

Colin Potter follows with some beautifully stretched-out church bells, offering only the ring, never the clang. Sacral in a whole new manner. This quasi-pious atmosphere carries over into Paul Bradley´s track, which opens wheezing in and out like an old harmonium, before more profane guitars, both fuzzed and plucked, join in and secularize proceedings altogether.

Newcomer Maile Colbert cuts up and pastes back together a small choir, again with harmonium accompaniment. Andrew Liles closes with "The Relentlessly Banal Landscape", striking low, ominous chords on a grand piano before ceding to a weeping violin.

That short coda sort of summarizes my feelings about this compilation - in the middle of it, Ubeboet and Potter provide something real, something new, something that made my day just a little bit better by hearing it. The rest, unfortunately, seems pretty much business as usual, part of the relentlessly banal landscape.

http://www.editionsonoro.com

Kama Aina, Club Kama Aina (Rumraket)

"Kama Aina" is apparently a Hawaiian term meaning "native" or "islander dweller". As Kama Aina the musical concept, Takuji Aoyagi creates delicate chamber music for the most basic and therefore most profound instruments - various breeds of guitar, accordion, piano and percussion.

Imagine wandering into an unlikely cross between a tiki lounge, an intimate folk club just off campus in a small university town, and a European style old-world café, and you´ve got an idea of the slightly skewed mood of the "club" Aoyagi has created.

Adding to the uniqueness is the curious Tokyo-Glagow connection, as he visits the dour Scottish industrial city to collaborate with cellist Isobel Campbell, The Pastels and multi-instrumental talent Bill Wells.

Listening to this music does a heart good. It is calming, romantic (especially the title track), and fun in a way that will not make you laugh out loud but will pull at the corners of your mouth. Club Kama Aina is an irony-free zone, which allows an otherwise wonderfully naive and loveable instrument like the electone, a Japanese organ, to shine unselfconsciously on its showcase tracks "Wedding Song" and the Latin-tinged "Mud Cat".

The "Scottish" pieces are more skeletal, fragile to the touch and minimalistic in an overall context already without unnecessary window-dressing. All colour has been drained out but exquistely so. The sweet male/female vocals by two of the three Pastels on "Millport" are of e.e. cummings-like succinctness.

The character of Club Kama Aina is relaxed. Just melodic ideas that get let out into the meadow to meander and play for a while.

http://www.rumraket.net

Rapoon, Alien Glyph Morphology (Caciocavallo)

Rapoon is an alchemist, turning base metal into gold. Listen closely, and you will detect, at the very bottom of music, an array of rusted junk strewn willy-nilly on the ground, serving no purpose. Rapoon beats on it, bows it, treats its sounds in sonic alchemical baths, and utterly transforms it into something new, strange, and alien.

Alien Glyph Morphology is obviously a set which means something special to him: It was first released on DVD, a video set to music. Then came a double 10" vinyl set, and now a "conventional" CD. Aside from the handsome oversized wallet which contains it, the contents are almost the same as the vinyl - two tracks have been extended and a new one, "Condensed Nightmares", added. While this listener would hardly compare the track to a bad dream, it does hold the added attraction of featuring the seldom heard voice of Robin Storey, singing desultory nonsense syllables along with the bare melody.

Compared with much of his gigantic discography, this piece demands a bit more attention. Rather than being strictly ambient music, his usual stomping grounds, the music of Alien Glyph Morphology sounds like jazz played in the bars where the weirder figures of the beat generation´s imagination might hide out - all moving slo-mo in a murky, syrupy haze. In the case of a couple of crisper pieces (like "The Paranoia of Abstraction"), I am reminded of Brian Eno´s attempt at "alien jazz" on "The Drop".

At the very outset of the album, a voice rambles on in the background, offering you the choice of listening to what it has to say - is it anything worthwhile? - or dig it as just one stream of sound along with the others. Be reassured that less attention-grabbing, amorphous drift is still one component, at least, as evidenced by the rather lighthearted, thirteen-minute "Welcome to the Space Age" that follows. However, the very next track snaps its fingers in your face demanding your attention once again, with a background of detourned ethnic sacral chants interplaying with one another in the background. A later track, "Stealth Coming", is what I would characterize as "classic Rapoon" - a low percussive rumble dominates over which play a panorama of northern lights, shapeshifting and disembodied, voices and signs in the sky.

Storey has stated that he hopes his music is appreciated as above all "human", that listeners understand that it is about that most exclusively human impulse, curiosity, and the search for meaning where there is none. This album is some kind of ethnographic travelogue sent from the outer limits - of what? The meaning is in the search, and the works of Robin Storey are among those which make the search rewarding.

Marc Namblard, Chants of Frozen Lakes (Kalerne)

I recall these sounds; I have heard them on an isolated frozen lake in Northern Ontario. They are among the most remarkable to be heard when nature is at its quietest.

One "service" provided by field recordists is the revelation of unheard-of and unheard sounds. Some of their sources can astonish and educate as much as any deep-sea documentary. Here, the soft melody and unexpected percussiveness of something which appears to lie very, very still is showcased - the frozen surface of a lake.

With the occasional lone crow cawing in the background and gust of wind howling through the treetops, Marc Namblard spent a day in January recording the ice on Lac de Pierre Percée in northeastern France, eventually editing it down to a fifty-five minute symphony.

Various atmospheric changes throughout the day cause changes in the tension of the ice sheet, and as the occasional crack appears it gives off the most unexpected, sharp sound, like the cheap electronic zap of a video game eliminating alien spaceships. Occasionally these zaps turn into a swarm as one crack leads to a chain reaction across the ice. It is a fascinating experience and wonderful to have indoors to enjoy.

First release on a new label from Taiwan, of all places, co-run by Yannick Dauby, himself no stranger to ambient field recording.

http://www.kalerne.net

Robin Saville, Peasgood Nonsuch (Static Caravan)

Although sounding more like the name of a character Shakespeare struck from the script of "A Midsummer Night´s Dream" in his final revision, "Peasgood Nonsuch" is actually a variety of apple grown in England (best harvested in October).

Robin Saville´s album is so very evocative of rural England, so much and so pleasantly so that it is almost the magically anthropomorphized England of classic children´s tales. Imagine if a character in "The Wind in the Willows" had been a composer - this is what he would have written.

It is good-natured and dry-witted, which is evident both in track titles and the light touch brought to the compositions and the playing. Swaying and bubbling electronics are delicately combined with acoustic instruments, usually a guitar. Saville stays low to the ground and conveys the essense of a shift in the breeze or the fragrance of a flower, the smallest and therefore most important elements of the bucolic life.

http://www.staticcaravan.org

Hey-o-Hansen, The 06 Singles (Heyrec)

In 2006 Hey-o-Hansen released a series of twelve-inch singles, from which they have now culled six original tracks and five remixes. This two-man circus takes us on a seventy-five minute "Journey into Berlin´s Afro-Alpin-Dubstep-Killersound". I´m not really sure what that means other than they value the beats and bass of Africa and the West Indies as much as they enjoy the native sounds of their Alpine homeland, represented primarily by some wonderfully swingin´ accordian right off the bat on track one, "Moon". But it also tips you off to the fact that these fellows have a wicked and silly sense of humour. Which is nice in dance music, a genre that takes itself all too seriously.

If I understand the genesis properly, originally Hey was a solo act, teaming up occasionally with Hansen. Now they have taken on board the barely-under-control dancehall singer Sir Lord Gordon Odametey and have also been lent a hand by members of Múm from Iceland. As they take on collaborators they take on influences and expand their sound palette.

Further evidence of the breadth of their odd tastes are samples from such unlikely candidates as the leader of the conservative Popular Party in Spain and the regional chief economist and director of social and economic development for the World Bank's Middle East and North Africa office.

Musically, the trio range so far all over the map that you´ll be finding everything from steel drums to brass bands somewhere in among the heady, steady rhythms. The only real miss is the preachy, plodding "Abraxas" - as a jeremiad against slavery one must of course admire its convictions, but it just doesn´t fit in such happy, colourful surroundings.

And just when you think you´ve had too much fun, the remixers take over, all of them working out of Berlin and most of whose reputations have unfortuntely not reached much further. Yet. As with any remix, the art is in doing something with someone else´s ideas as a point of departure. And everybody does, but to be honest none really stand out as work which will break them internationally. If I had to choose a favourite, I´d take Thaddeus Herrmann´s "Jack is a Simple Fellow..." for the great sense of space it creates.

Still and all, I can hardly think of an album you can have more innocent fun with.

http://www.heyrec.org