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review by Bill Binkelman The enigmatic duo who record as Austere have released what is, to my ears, their best album yet. remission is a recording of delicate and beautiful yet sorrowful songs, all created using various permutations of guitar-originated sound sources. So, what you have is not just excellent music from an artistic standpoint (kind of like a stripped down version of Tim Story, played sans piano) but also from a technical perspective as well. Interestingly enough, Austere told me that originally the goal was for the recording to be "a rather pretty, blissful album, but there has been a lot of sadness and even death in our lives lately, and despite our best intentions, those feelings crept in. Most of the songs are love songs, though, if one can believe that." Yes, I can believe it, albeit these are love songs about lost loves, tragic loves, and painful loves. The opening track is perhaps the "lightest" song here. "shokai" is wave after wave of billowy Jeff Pearce-like echoed and reverberated guitar loops, neutral in tone but quite pretty and wholly ambient in feel, although not truly a "quiet" sound either. Next is "crimson," and here is where remission starts to spiral downward into the darker emotional soundscapes of despair and sadness, albeit in an accessible and occasionally beautiful manner. Gently plucked lower register notes reverberate, vibrate and then collapse on one another, while subtle drones/tones flow underneath. The effect is almost stiflingly sorrowful, although the music itself is also suffused with beauty akin to the Tim Story-like quality I mentioned earlier. Sampled dialogue snippets include one that states "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long." Other washes of warm darkness envelop the outer edges of the song, and while nothing substantially "different" happens as the track evolves, the subtle shifts in tones keeps the song from going stale. After a brief prototypical Austere bell-like drone, "wend" opens with a cool dialogue sample and then morphs into a wispy yet dark series of tones, drones and washes. A whistling texture weaves snakelike through the darker underpinnings. "la capella reservado" is barely there at the start; it's very faint, but emerges as a somber number, with long sustained low register notes/tones that are quite minimal in execution. This may be the most ominous song on the CD; the emotional response would be like waiting for something truly sad or tragic to happen! Other songs on remission include the eerie "bloombaum" which borders on a "storm in hell" atmosphere, with thunderous crescendos of drones counterpointed by recognizable guitar strumming, which is followed by one of the moodier pieces on the album, "morning glory." This song combines reverbed sparse guitar notes with slowly ebbing and flowing textures, while later a whispered male voice utters esoteric poetry, and does so as if speaking into a tape recorder. The album closes in an optimistic vein with "sunset," layering pleasant (emotionally neutral) ambient guitar loops on top of floating textures that resemble synth strings. Austere's music is an admitted acquired taste. I've enjoyed most of what they have recorded (especially Monodia and fade) and remission, as I wrote above, is their best work. It's ambitious, complex (for a minimalist drone-like ambient recording), yet accessible when compared to other albums in this subgenre. While it's not sunny, it's not so grim as to be too depressing. It's sad music, but given the way it was made (with all manner of studio wizardry concocted on guitars), I found it surprisingly musical and warm at times. I usually have to work to get through ambient music of this type, but (as with most of this duo's releases) remission is an easy album to live with. You can listen to it or play it as background ambiance. It works well both ways. Recommended to fans of the genre and adventurous guitar music aficionados. |
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