[Love's Label]

So here’s the long and short of it: nearly 20 years ago, two best friends from Chicago, Chris Ike and John Kardaras, fell deep into the city’s house scene through club nights and dubs of WNUR shows. They got busy with some analog gear, christened themselves Shifty Science, released a couple of tracks to some acclaim, and then quickly fell into obscurity, even going so far as to quit releasing their music. Fast-forward to 2009, when a couple of next-generation Chicago house heads (one of whom, full disclosure, is the editor-in-chief of this site) decide to throw a joint birthday party and invite one of Shifty Science’s biggest fans from back in the day, former DJ and current heart-on-sleeve ambient wunderkind bvdub, to headline. Everyone hit it off famously; and when one of the birthday boys, James Cardis, started Love’s Label the next year, he hit up Shifty Science and bvdub for contributions. And now, as 2010 winds down, 300 copies of what resulted are fluttering around the world.

Love’s Label’s first release met cute, so to speak. But Shifty Science and bvdub’s long-overdue collaborative revisiting of unreleased material packs far more heft than adorability might imply. Same Boat, Different Sea / Love’s Not Fading merges the old-school, strictly underground sensibility you’d expect from the back story with the sort of epic, bathtub-full-of-feelings soundscapes you’d look for in bvdub. We get more of the latter on “Same Boat, Different Sea,” a bvdub composition remixed by Shifty Science. While Brock Van Wey’s music has never been short on warmth, the size of its heart is occasionally overwhelming and ungainly. Whether due to Shifty Science’s spot-on beats or ability to let this creation rise slowly, bvdub here is anything but downtrodden; rather, the track sounds damn near ready to run smiling into battle. Van Wey’s B-side, his personal favorite Shifty Science track “Love’s Not Fading” remixed under his new Earth House Hold guise, reveals a richly internalized understanding of the scene that got Shifty Science making records. Rainy-day keys and a steady, circa-1992 pulse hold down the foreground, but that diva lurking just below “Love’s Not Fading”‘s surface — crying out unintelligibly from an old but still gripping and immediate memory — is pure bvdub. If you’re like me, you’ll be on the fence for weeks about which side is your favorite; different as they are, I’ve found it really comes down to what sort of warm embrace you’re in the mood for.

In a scene where so many microscopic record labels shroud themselves in an obscurity of their own making, it’s a welcome change of pace to see some names on the label and get some really nice words from the artists about how something inherently obscure came together. Regardless of whether Love’s Label can keep putting together 12″s this steeped in obscure house music history and sheer camaraderie, the imprint undoubtedly has its heart in the right place. Whatever’s next for LL, Van Wey’s nascent Earth House Hold project, and (fingers crossed) Shifty Science will certainly be worthy of our collective bear hug.

[Kompakt]

Seasons come, seasons go, and with them Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series, where the label’s clockwork ticks much slower than usual. Not that Pop Ambient’s reliability has never been in question: every time a new installment filters through the opinion-maze of web- and music criticism, someone proclaims it’s not as good as the last one, or the series’ key idea is petering out, or maybe Kompakt should stick to making IKEA techno, or that it’s too much of the same thing, or whatever. Regardless of the occasional arcs in quality (I seem to recall 2006 to 2008 not grabbing my attention quite so strongly), the complaints are a tad confusing. Surely Pop Ambient’s brief is to be “too much of the same thing,” to essay myriad variations on that lovingly hazy, gaseous, oddly catchy, plastic ambient sound they’ve perfected, to take a relatively long time to say relatively the same thing at pretty much exactly the same time of year? Ragging on Pop Ambient for being stagnant is much like complaining that Phill Niblock plays the same note for a long time. It is kind of the point — well, not so much stagnancy, but certainly the careful exploration of a rather small patch of land. Sometimes Niblock plays two notes, too.

[zero r="Pop Ambient 2010" a="Bvdub" t="You Know Where To Find Me"]

Pop Ambient releases are set free into the deepest European winter. Certainly, there’s something of the chafing cold, of being rugged up against the elements, in the way things unfold: witness the geological rate of development in tracks like Brock Van Wey/Bvdub’s “Will You Know Where To Find Me,” which takes over fifteen minutes to slowly unwind itself. The overarching tenor here is misty and blurred, whether the aqueous repose of Mikkel Metal’s “Blue Items,” the gray lagoons of Triola’s “Schildergasse,” or the latticed ice-shards of opener “The Sound Of One Lip Kissing,” yet another of Marsen Jules’ attempts to make the world stop and start according to the power of his computer’s delay setting.

[zero r="Pop Ambient 2010" a="Marsen Jules" t="The Sound Of One Lip Kissing"]

But Pop Ambient 2010 turned up down here, in the Southern Hemisphere, in the midst of a blazing summer. I’ve already spent many long weekend days with it circling on repeat in my apartment, the audio streaking the air while sun floods the room, weaving its way through the Venetian blinds and illuminating dust particles swimming through the heat fug. All things are not the same, it seems. If anything suits the mood in Australia, it’s the oddly sluggish loops of Wolfgang Voigt’s “Zither Und Horn,” which suggest a folk band dosed on so many downers they can barely lift their fingers to play their instruments, or the queasy drones that flutter below and around the pointillist piano of DJ Koze’s “Bodenweich,” which for some reason recalls a spritely, happy-sad version of Japan’s “Ghosts.” Or maybe that’s just the heatstroke.

[zero r="Pop Ambient 2010" a="DJ Koze" t="Bodenweich"]

If Pop Ambient could do anything for its next installment, it would be to stretch its tentacles of community further, maybe call on figures like Andrew Chalk, William Basinski (who received a dedication on Pop Ambient 2009), Leyland Kirby, or Robert Haigh, whose delicate miniatures and hazy dronology isn’t actually too far removed from some of the more questioning moments on Pop Ambient 2010. But hey, alright — it’s still one of the loveliest things you’ll hear all year. And if you’re coming back from a long night out, it’s the perfect thing to tuck you in to bed in the morning. Comedowns for the post-club hours. Your lounge-room’s now the chill-out zone.

[zero a="Various Artists" r="Pop Ambient 2010"]

[echospace [detroit]]

With a faultless series of releases focused on ambient atmospheres and techno textures, Brock Van Wey — perhaps better known as Bvdub, has rapidly become an indispensable fixture of the deeper side of electronica. His latest long player is broken into two parts, with kindred spirit Intrusion offering interpretations of the six tracks in reverse order for the second part of the album. The album’s inspiration is hinted at in the liner notes which feature a poem by Chinese poet Wang Wei, the last line of which is adopted by Van Wey for the album title.

A serenely meditative collection of droning ambience, White Clouds Drift On and On makes studied detail of the repetitive fabric of woven pads, strings and silken noise. Van Wey’s floating compositions weigh in with a gossamer lightness despite an occasional mournful tenderness here and there. “I Knew Happiness Once” is a prime example of this, the yearning tones hint at some long ago emotional treasure buried by time, though the mood remains overall of hope rather than despair. On “A Gentle Hand To Hold” fragile guitar strings combine with angelic, breathy snatches of voices while vast, cascading pads rain down from the heavens. “A Chance To Start Over” takes these elements in reverse, the backwards guitars sucked up into an invisible vacuum, the strains of voices swallowed back into the mouths they came from as pulsing pianos key minute melodies. With the basis of White Clouds Drift On and On being comprised of broad sweeping pads and otherworldly, near religious sounding vocal phrases, these exploratory soundscapes would not sound out of place in a surreal nature documentary. In fact it is hard not to picture the equally wondrous and haunting images of Baraka while listening to this album.

Stephen Hitchell applies his Intrusion touch to the album, adding not only his own interpretation of the tracks but also some notably absent bottom end. The Intrusion “Shapes” are not the usual hallucinatory dub-influenced fare you’d expect from Hitchell; in keeping with the ambient nature of the album his versions are slow, ambling excursions into the deepest of atmospherics. Armed with just a kick drum, a light smattering of toms and some hats, Intrusion creates the same dreamy vibrations he is known for with his more uptempo releases on “A Gentle Hand To Hold,” though with the BPM here hovering around 70 here the amount of breathing space he creates is astounding. The dubbier side of Intrusion emerges on “A Chance To Start Again,” “Forever A Stranger” and “I Knew Happiness Once,” though these too remain purposefully sedentary. Van Wey and Hitchell each capture a masterful beauty in their respective parts on this album, one which is a modern ambient masterpiece and shows each producer in prime form. It will however be much easier to aurally digest by those who are content to lay back and gaze skyward while the two and a half hours of gentle undulating rhythms roll and wash over them.

[Millions of Moments]

Like any self-respecting trainspotter worth their salt, when I come across a producer whose music moves me, I need to find out more about them. Learning that San Francisco native Bvdub has been producing music for less than two years came as a huge shock, but deeper digging revealed a musical pundit versed in over 15 years of knowledge and experience through DJing. It would be somewhat churlish to cast the tag of dub techno on his productions. Yes, there is an undeniable tendency towards those textures and chords and yes he counts Quantec among his kindred producers. However, there is something about his compositions compelling deeper contemplation surpassing any easy label or categorization. Perhaps it has something to do with his true love being ambient music or maybe it’s his trying to forge the deepest communications possible through his sculpted sounds that arouses such cogitation.

His latest excursion is a double whammy on Styrax’s sister label Millions of Moments, releasing “Wish I Was Here” and “Where To Now” at the same time, though we’ll stick to the former for now. The title track begins with a low thrum of feeling trying to rise above the static crackle of a voice lost in a radio or TV transmission. A soft kick appears, chords fall and are swept away by an undercurrent, the whole feeling so ethereal you’ll scarcely notice the nearly 12 minutes duration of the track pass by. At the peak of “Wish I Was Here” a spare bass line fires off three short stabs every two bars and the lost voices return to babble their incoherent incantations amidst a lonely hi-hat snapping off hits.

“Vermillion” is even more dream-like; long beat-less tendrils of emotive bliss gradually adopting 4/4 structures, breaking them back down again to atmospherics and repeating the process. Some of the pads carry with them a vibration that sounds like millions of insect wings fluttering no slower than those of a hummingbird, others carry the whisper of human voice. Listening to this 12″ feels like an audible postcard from space, slowly watching the sun rise over the curling edges of Earth, bathing it in light. Simply stunning.