Various Artists, Perceived Distances (Blue Oasis)

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This brand new London, Ontario based label is a sibling to DataObscura. The compilation collects exclusive tracks by a new generation of ambient artists, most of whom have been garnering a reputation and an audience through that most ambient of all media, the netlabel. It is the brainchid of one of its own, Anthony Paul Kerby, who makes music under the monickers of Lammergeyer, The Circular Ruins and Nunc Stans.

Indeed, The Circular Ruins, collaborating with Off the Sky, initiate the proceedings with a tune which moves from airy to bubbly, smooth to stippled. Saul Stokes then serves up some of his patented softly beating space music. After a little guitar work, Beta Two Agonist taps lightly against the eardrum with "Seele", one of the prettiest and most visually suggestive pieces of the collection.

Entia Non´s "Seeing Light" is another track rich in unexpected aesthetic delights, before the nostalgia-invoking Circular Ruins, whose "Nobody Knows" features a low, vaguely Oriental pattern mixed down deep in its thick electronic carpet. On Dreaming the Seed´s "Reaching Out", the human voice is presented as a brief, almost not-there chorus.

The album as a whole has a generally starlight-bright sound, broken by Rumforskning, who seems to be the only artist interested in investigating the darkness in between the stars. As we near the end, and for all its cumulative drama, Kwook´s "Time Wheels" is shiny and glistening and fun to listen to, like looking at brightly-coloured toys lying in the grass after being freshened by a brisk sunshower. The closer "Mellow" by Marco Lucchi is reminiscent of the coda to Eno´s seminal "Another Green World", lightly tossed - maybe intended as a nod of inspirational debt?

One thing connecting many of the tracks is chatter, unobtrusively lending an air of eavsdropping on the collection. While I hardly think this was part of the brief given the artists, it sort of illuminates the idea of "perceived distances" - not only the geographic location of the contributors but our brain´s difficulty to fathom distance from people we can now access so clearly and readily with the available communications technology.

An excellent introduction to a whole passle of interesting new artists and sounds.

http://www.dataobscura.com/apk