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Dreams, Fiends, and Serene: Recent Hypnos Activity | ||||||||||
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 The Hypnos label is well known among ambient music fans for a long string of high quality releases stretching back over the last ten years. Artists on the Hypnos roster include some of the most respected ambienteers, including Robert Rich, Jeff Pearce, Vidna Obmana and Jeff Greinke, in addition to the label boss M. Griffin. In 2005 Griffin accelerated the Hypnos release schedule and started a sub label, Hypnos Secret Sounds, which releases slightly more esoteric music on limited edition CD-Rs, with runs generally in the 200-300 range. The sub label remains successful, and there are almost two dozen Secret Sounds releases to date, including the first two albums discussed here. Darkened Soul is a project of Mike Soucy, and Bathys is his second solo album of dark ambient music after a release on Umbra, the Italian ambient artist Oöphoi's label. Soucy presents six tracks with Greek titles, all amorphous drones with an emphasis on low frequencies, drenched in reverb. The album title means "deep" in Greek, and it is an appropriate image for the music. Between the low frequencies and the vast distances implied by the echoes, the album conjures up subterranean and sub aquatic images, deep underground caverns of indeterminate proportions. While most of the album contains sounds with a wide harmonic spectrum, almost approaching white noise, Soucy also occasionally and discreetly mixes in sharp and precise sounds. On the title track he adds a metallic arhythmic hammering sound that adds to the infernal atmospheres, and on Ateleiotos Agkareia (Endless Labor) there are sounds like a large metal object dragged across a stone floor. Apart from a couple of insignificant and infrequent loops, melodies are hard to spot on this album, where the primary focus is on changes in texture, with rumbles and sudden sonic blasts providing variation. The individual pieces have their own characteristics, but the listener joins them for a time as works in progress, little snapshots of the eternal sounds. While Bathys conjures edgy images of underground gloom, Steve Brand's Bridge to Nowhere is a placid lake on whose mirrored surface each sound's ripples linger for a moment, before they merge into the nearly motionless surface. Brand, a Reiki master and visual artist as well as a musician, has several releases spanning the last decade, many of them in a more experimental vein under the project name Augur, but in the last five years he has moved more into ambient music with releases under his own name. Serenity and calm are the watchwords here, as Brand composes using relatively clear sounds of long duration. The title piece, split into two tracks, weaves voice, flute and piano over a subtle and transparent background in part one, then builds layer after layer with a thick set of slow moving loops in part two. The glacial pace of the music pervades everything with a sense of peacefulness. Breathing Light opens with a beautiful, slow, clear melody over a background of nighttime crickets, sounding almost reverential because of the pipe organ sonorities. The piano melody in the middle of the piece transports the yearning to another world. The last track, Through the Lens of Love, breaks the slow melodic pattern to introduce delicate percussion sounds and rhythms, but without altering the overall feeling of calm that pervades the album. The piece and the album close with a deep and assertive melody that gently recedes into the tranquility with which the album opened. Fabrication, label manager M. Griffin's most recent release, has been officially forthcoming for over a decade and is at long last released on the main Hypnos imprint. Although Griffin typically uses various electronic instruments, Fabrication is somewhat of a departure in that he used field recordings captured on binaural microphones, to which he later added his own voice in the studio, creating loops that weave in and out as in a dream. While it is not unusual to base a record from location recordings, Griffin avoids the cliches of this sub genre and has created an album that sounds very different from other ambient music releases. Spacious, smooth drones comprise much of the music, but it still retains the character of original recordings. For instance, Griffin credits a number of different water sources, and tracks like Air Sense Space have an overwhelming feeling of rushing water, not through the trickling burbles, but a constant rush of movement. The first five tracks are all in the six to eight minute range, little vignettes of sound. But the last track, Sky is Glass Lit, is in a different class altogether, a sonic narration for almost twenty-three minutes. Griffin tells a story in motion with this piece, not merely drifting from one state to another, but incorporating highly rhythmic transitional sections that sound like traveling, helicopters and trains, with the disembodied voices sounding like announcements in a distant part of the terminal. Long-form drone works with narrative qualities are rare, and Griffin's piece is an impressive achievement. These three releases barely scratch the surface of Hypnos activity in 2008. With eleven releases already this year and several more in the pipeline, Griffin and his colleagues are diversifying the range of ambient music. With these three excellent releases alone, we have dark and light, location and studio, serene and infernal. Who knows what shades of ambient await elsewhere in the Hypnos garden? Review by Caleb Deupree
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