Various Artists, Resonant Embers (Edition Sonoro)

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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. 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