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Altered Realities - Erdem Helvacioğlu | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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 One of the biggest bones of contention among ambient music fans is the presence or absence of a melodic component in compositions/recordings and whether or not its absence or presence detracts from the “ambient aesthetic.” Inject too much melody into the affair and you are accused of making “pretty” music, ideal for crystal worshipers. Record what amounts to mere static drones and you can be assured someone will state you’re just recording noise with no forethought or creativity whatsoever. This brings us to the middle ground, where an artist dares to walk the tightrope of melodic sensibility. A place where a listener can easily detect chords, refrains, and notes intermixed with more cerebral, intellectual and challenging textures, experimentation and flotsam/jetsam, i.e. the avant garde side of ambient music. This is where guitarist/sound sculptor Erdem Helvacioğlu lives. On Altered Realities, recording in real time with no overdubs, mixing, editing or post-production, and using only an acoustic guitar and “live electronics,” he travels both pathways: warm, friendly and inviting and also haunting, disorienting, and foreboding. It adds up to an enriching listening experience that deserves, no, begs to be dissected and absorbed patiently and with careful attention to the details. It’s not just Helvacioğlu’s technical accomplishment on this CD (it’s frankly startling that this the music is all being recorded in real time…does this guy have four hands?), but also the delicate balance he maintains throughout the fifty-four minutes, the razor’s edge of confusion and chaos, the tension of a tightly-wound spring yet the suppleness of a languid sunset. I can’t accurately give you a comparative statement (i.e. “He sounds like X”). Now and then I hear echoes of other artists, but they are mere phantoms or illusions. The iridescent yet frozen tonalities of Bridge to Horizon draw you in, promising warmth despite the crystalline nature of the music. Gentle guitar strums and delicate chordal melodies belie the dangers ahead on tracks like Dreaming on a Blind Saddle with its reverberating cascades of notes blending into sustained drones comprised of sustain and echo. Shimmering electronics mesh with miasmic confluences and then subside into a slow moving lava flow of sound. The cheery refrains on Frozen Resophonic morph into percolating electronic telegraphic pulses before settling into what can only be described as a pleasant assemblage of plucked guitar and dancing electrons. The eerily-titled Shadow My Dovetail starts off in a mournful vein with subdued electronic textures bouncing off of sparse strummed guitar and builds into a semi-cacophonous confluence of colliding noises and drones, ending with dissonant guitar pluckings and distorted electronic conflagrations. On the closing Ebony Remains hyper-chattery effects mirrored against a spacy high-pitched drone slowly subdue into a somber minimalist guitar tone poem, and then revert again into something that blends the two disparate natures into a singular musical entity. By now you may have figured out how ambitious Helvacioğlu is on Altered Realities. While my exposure to recordings this far afield from mainstream ambient is less broad than some of my contemporaries, that doesn’t invalidate my appreciation for how skillfully and artistically the artist maneuvers between the approachable aesthetic of straight-forward guitar-led ambience and sonic explorations which test the boundary of the accessible. Somehow, he has discovered the no man’s land where both co-exist and for that we should all be exceedingly grateful. Review by Bill Binkelman
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