Various Artists, I, Mute Hummings (CD Ex Ovo)

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A fresh, new label co-founded by Tobias Fischer and Mirko Uhlig with the express intent of serving as a home for "drone music and dulcet atmospheres". Despite its difficult-to-parse title, this debut compilation features mostly soothing tracks by six of the most prominent names currently generating drone music, a veteran Moog pioneer, and the "world premiere" of a thirty-year-old recording by a former member of Tangerine Dream (okay, he only played on one of their albums, 1978´s "Cyclone").

I, Mute Hummings opens with Keith Berry´s magnificent, distant, and hollow-sounding "The Crossing", and then just keeps getting more magnificenter, with the odd bump in the road along the way.

By now, most fans of ambient music are aware of the fact that veteran ambienteer and experimentalist Dirk Serries has hung up his Vidna Obmana skates in order to concentrate full time on his latest project, Fear Falls Burning. This is possibly the most accesible track I have heard by him under that monicker, quiet, almost distractedly strummed guitar tastefully fed into the reverb machine. Almost an "around-the-campfire" moment.

Dronæment´s contribution crackles and crawls ominously in the dirt, while Troum present a yeoman effort of dark isolationism, so dim as to almost not be there. Strumming returns with the Feu Follet (Fischer) remix of Jeffrey Roden´s "The Seeds of Happiness", a lighter moment (though entirely based on bass) that evolves into something danker and more forbidding while less palpable and definable.
Paul Bradley´s track is a close relative of Berry´s, soft and gentle as a kid glove stroking your cheek while you drift off to sleep. "One More Haggard Drowned Man" is erstwhile Tangerine Steve Jolliffe´s decades-old track, an incongruent effort featuring flute being dissolved into a zinc-bath of glitch in Uhlig´s "Redundant Minimal Development" mix. A bit perplexing, a bit purposeless.

Column One´s penultimate track is nothing for your present reviewer, being ear piercing of your ear drums rather than your lobes. Kind of unpleasnt. However, Richard Lainhart closes the proceedings on a high note by revisiting his own "White Nights" (1974) - originally a half-hour, "glistening" drone according to Fischer´s own article about the composer <http://www.tokafi.com/newsitems/thesefirstdays/view>. It takes the listener heavenward and begs to be re-released separately, on its own disc, and at least twice as long as the original.

And if these seventy-seven minutes aren't enough, the first one hundred copies sold through mail order come with a separately-packaged bonus disc, "Mute Scribbles", a further seventy-two minutes on the same theme by artists including Uhlig and Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf (one and the same individual), Brian Uzna and Feu Follet . A bit sketchier, as the title makes clear - like excerpts of works-in-progress, but no less satisfying for that.

A double feast for the drone connoisseur.

http://www.exovo.org