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Behind the Celer Door | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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 "So often we re-live experiences through memories, and just repeating them. We just want to soundtrack that, translating those movements, emotions, and experiences into sounds of our own."  Celer is the vehicle of Will Long and Dani Baquet-Long, ambient and texturalist duo with an impressive and ever-growing back catalogue. Their organic-digital sound art comes with a mission: “to produce works that reflect the nature of love, family, and their concerns and interests, through a relative and absolute symposium of expression.” Emotion - often ambiguous or remote in Ambient - is thus the spur, their relationship, from distance to up close, figurative to actual, reflected in Celer. But theirs is no private party, no sublimated love-in. The sprawl in thrall to textural transport is inclusive. Of the works profiled here, some unfold in pointillistic micro-movements, others in broad brushstroke long-format tracts. But for all its warm fuzzy exterior, their Timbre-land is built on rigorous methodology - one of careful sourcing and live recording, blending with field sounds, re-assembling, then sampling, layering and processing. Artisans in the Age of the Plug-in, Celer's labours bring returns in the form of sonorities of depth and richness. So, let's look what lies behind the Celer door.
Nacreous Clouds (and/OAR) is a depiction of forms that drape themselves in the winter across the skies of the polar North. These clouds get sunlight from below the horizon and reflect it to the ground, radiant before dawn or after dusk. 37 short tracks of iridescent ambience reflect their inner life, mercurial nature reflected in their evanescence. Sounds drawn from life (showers,  running water, TV static, wind, cars, gravel streets) and instruments (cello, piano, bells) are formed into mellifluous mother-of-pearl tonalities. A mimesis of cloud motions in sound structures, filmy strata delicately unfurl, stretch and contract (see this sequence), mirroring their tendency to reveal the wind and waves of the stratosphere. Rawer than usual for this process-heavy pair, timbres are left exposed (what? no reverb?!) to shine through undimmed - more innocent, immediate. Possibly more affecting for this, Nacreous Clouds has the same pleasingly tranquillizing effect as cloudwatching.
 Capri (Humming Conch) is a similarly winsome work replete with piano, strings, horns, acoustic guitar, field recordings - of Mediterranean draughts and the faint sting of the Scirocco. Material was sourced from the isle of Capri during a short summer sojourn, lending a warm balmy aspect. Evocations of ambulations by harbour waves, a salty wind wafting up the Via, crumbling white walls, and the deep colors of the Blue Grotto (see artwork). "Mouthfeels Of Capreae" is a beguiling starter to the proceedings, after which come soft drones and veiled field recordings, processed as if to a breeze, compactings conveying an air of island nights. Recorded in a single room with a piano and a few borrowed instruments, and processed on the hoof, the results are quiet reflections of passing experiences. Celer's wont is to allow slowly evolving melodies to be heard, at first as if through a dim-tinted glass, then sharpening and clearing gradually, or let fleeting fragments blow by, borne on the dusky air.
 Cursory Asperses (Slow Flow) is a series of pieces based around the single concept of slow movement. Throughout the process of composing and mixing, the artists cleaved to the form of certain field recordings - the slow trickle of water at an isolated stream, laundry in the backyard flapping in the wind. Celer commingle these with other instrumental tones, delicate gossamer layers, into a fuller form of slow movement, intended to display their interpretation of the soft nature of an emergent Slow Flow house style, as illustrated on "Natatorial Swings". Sculpted layers are laid down blanket-like for the listener to languish in, here swelling into foamy upward spirals, there subsiding into lower registers, in places recalling the eloquent lacunae of Thomas Köner in the hushed magnificence of its voids.
Neon (self released) uses found sound sourced from neon light tubes, taking loops of pure instruments, then using specially sequenced sensors that respond to localised fluctuations in light  colour and intensity, transforming light into sounds. Predominantly delicate gauzy pieces of gentle ebb-flow. Trademark enigmatic titles like “Homes Between the Channels, Under the Dams” are less personal document than suggestive prompt. For all its seeming strangeness of sound source, Neon is no radical departure from previous Celer-ities. The aim of documenting “the transformation of sound into the beauty of electroluminescence” is achieved, but, concept and method aside, the allure of Neon's light is what matters.
Engaged Touches (Home Normal) is their most recent, and most engrossing, combination of experimental soundscape and minimalist loopism. A most distinctive Celer-y flavour comes from a rich infusion of neo-classical romanticism. "Part #1" has huge waves of echo-steeped stringsweeps  wash back and forth in bold stripes of sound, punctuated with episodic location recordings. Phases of field infusions and grandiose loopism are interwoven, orchestrating a dynamic of binaries: concrete-abstract, prosaic-poetic, earthly-elevated, etc. Longing, melancholy and nostalgia emerge as leitmotifs as "Part #2" develops themes further, drawing on a wider palette, descending to the deepest drone-depths before resurging to a majestic finale of distended and dissolving strings, evoking a yearning sense of distance, made intimately epic.
 Breeze of Roses (Dragons Eye), due in April, originates from a long weekend spent by the duo on the banks of Austria's Lake Attersee. During a break in a rainstorm, a recording was made in the belly of a docked sailboat using mini-piano, whistles, and cello. A direct field recording containing the thumps and thuds of water against the bottom of the boat and the wind howling outside of the open hatch was also made. Left in cryogenic suspension till recently, it was reanimated when memories compiled therein of Attersee's rosewind inspired them to awaken its slumbering sounds. The services of edit-heavy digi-chemistry and neo-expressionism are enlisted to bring it to billowing life. Breeze of Roses further evidences Celer's alchemical ability to mould inert matter into moving sound images.
 Tropical sees Celer granted the honour of a commemorative 50th release for Mystery Sea. Their sometimes watery habit (cf. Mesoscaphe) seems well situated here, given the label remit of nocturnal oceanism. Official sources claim Tropical is “all muggy heat, an intimate pulse swelling, raising from the depths, the scars of past...The sound of an invisible river reaching out and afar, while palm trees cry some golden tears...” And with titles like “Normal Sadness (The Softness of the Sea Hibiscus)” or “Empty Hum (An Open, Empty Ocean)” the sensual tepor of maritime shores seems to beckon, but these sullen mid-range tones conjure more tundra than Tropics, making this the least immediately alluring of these releases. Amorphous and dissipative, as on Exhibit A:  "The Second in a Sequence of Glances and Introductions", it's perhaps part of a sneaky strategy to keep listeners always returning for rewind-replay re-examining. By contrast, free-to-download mini-album, Elias, on the French Rain Music netlabel is far more concrete in concept and articulation, if much smaller scale. Also commemorative, but here in relation to the birth of a baby to a friend, whose voice is the provenance for its base ingredient. The outcome, as on "Untitled 1", soft hums rendered remote from Mum’s, sounds similarly silken serene to others here displayed.
 Four Pieces/One is one of Smallfish’s occasional 3”s, a single-track cyclical orchestral drone dubbed by the duo a “loop symphony”. Another long-form hypnagogue drone piece for total immersives, hosting a cascade of gorgeously oneiric tonefloat that sways and sussurates, steeped in arcane vapours. Celer obsessively sustain this static dynamic for the duration of "Aronia", with nuanced waverings of timbre and EQ, seamlessly seguing, vapour trails lapping and overlapping. The blithe exterior of this piece may lull, but comes carefully calibrated to bid you sleep no more. Compositions for Cassette leaks out a slow release of smeared piano 'removals' into quiet liminally unsettled stasis.  Served up as an homage to American pianists of the 1920s, it's an hour-long disintegrating loop odyssey of warped and warbly minimal sonatas, like "Untitled #4". All wreathed in shadows and fog, like a lo-fi/no-fi Piano Text, a mood of deep remotion imbues its spectral domain of drowned fragments. One for packaging and format fetishists, there are three different covers, each cassette (New/Old Media Carrier of the Month for the alt. anti-audiophile) packaged in cute mini-burlap bag with dinky Celer badge, looking all knowingly collectible.
In documenting the Celer soundpool's sources, one might well dwell on their classical and minimalist lineage, invoking Barber, Mahler, Satie, Reich, Pärt, Feldman, Eno, Budd et al; perhaps in passing allude to (de rigueur) Gas and (knee-jerk) Basinski; point to fellow-travellers,  whether those navigating similar North American aethers - the likes of Tim Hecker, Andrew Deutsch, and Adam Pacione, or miners of a Northern English underground - men with earthy names like Coleclough, Potter, and Bradley. But ultimately what lies behind the Celer door comes out idiosyncratic, ineffable. And what stands out, beneath the shroud of mysticism and poesis, is Celer's great facility for moving tones and environments through space to create soundscapes, intimate and epic, that echo the cadence and cascade of Romanticist classicism while reflecting their situation within post-digital late modernity.Review by Alan Lockett
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