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 In this post-everything age, it’s hard to hear anything shatteringly new in the experimental ambient universe, even at the most Out-there reaches of the dronosphere. Yet there's still much to be savoured in the glut of well wrought music in this vein, among which may be counted recent highs from Low Point. A burgeoning body of work curated by owner Gareth Hardwick has had a slow-release into the ambient world, first his friends in the North – Nottingham's Apalusa, Birmingham-based Chris Herbert, then opening wider to the international likes of Machinefabriek (NL), Celer and Strategy (US).
First to Hardwick's own Aversions. The label supremo’s 2nd full length has an ill-starred premise, but a happy outcome. Dejected at the loss of an album’s worth of new music in a hard drive crash horror, his aversion to going back to the drawing board led to a form of re-evaluation - taking stock before moving on, entrusting his back catalogue to others for their uh...versions (geddit?). Aversions manages to be authentic to the spirit of Hardwick’s muse, rising phoenix-like from HD ashes, while being a diverse collaborative album. Selected drone-cronies make free play with his pared back palette of loopy guitar gauze in various re-versions (the whole masterfully mastered by mastering master, 12k’s Taylor Deupree), from Library Tapes's ectoplasmic piano and tape hiss to Strategy’s pleasingly queasy space-lounge, on to Apalusa’s quasi-orchestral tone-haze, and the resonant billows of Chris Herbert. Gold stars, though, go to head Type-ist Xela and the tireless Machinefabriek. The former’s “High Tension” draws on the grit but holds the grim of his recent oeuvre, shunning favoured darker realms for looping vox and gently uplifting cadences of aerated synthiness. The latter’s “Lost In The Memory” achieves its rich flavour through folding fizzing drones and caustic twangs into a delicious treacly concoction laced with crackling. Yum.
 Brittle is a remnant from Will Long’s now sadly cleft musical union with partner Dani. Her untimely passing has apparently not dimmed his musical desire nor inhibited Celer’s prodigious output. 19 tracks were created, then stitched together into a single long-form audio-tapestry, affording a structure for distracted or focused listening, fleeting shadows of memory, elusive half-glimpses of desires in removal. The projected effect is to induce in the listener a blanket-wrapped mood of “warm comfort,” and the gently manoeuvred hum of timbres drawn from solicitously recorded and processed piano, violin, cello, tingsha bells, harpsichord and whistle, along with the ambient sound of an open-windowed room interior, certainly achieves this in passages; however, in others the simmering hush boils over with rumbling drones. And the mood is far from the fluffy-dolphin serene or sad-happy twee of popular ambient association, but rather attended by a vague disquiet, and a certain dissonance - discreet eddies just below an otherwise tranquil surface, an arcing cluster of tones at its centre, around which motifs detach themselves from within the pulsing endlessnessism of the whole. "Eustress" seems to imply a positive response from the organism to excess input, in light of which Brittle seems to sonically model a certain endurance and fortitude - stern, not wilting - as an object of focus in the face of the subject's existential fragility.
 Near And Faraway finds Fabio Orsi and Seaworthy tele-communing. Orsi has been orbiting the ambient cosmos some time now, with a raft of releases on experimental/drone imprints, Seaworthy less active with a pair of outings on 12k. Each artist contributes a solo track, bookending a collaborative centrepiece. The elevated bath of Orsi’s opener, “Evening by Evening,” offers a gorgeous sprawl in luscious drifting synth strings and effulgent major-key timbres - a typically fulsome outfolding, deploying an ocean of effected guitar layers, keyboard halos, run through by the chatter of children. Seaworthy's “Branch And Stone” offers a more low-lit setting, more stripped than symphonic, a more open-textured fabric with long echoing shreds of guitar suspended in the air like dust illuminated; half-glimpsed figures and feedback curlicues drift, mere shades of their string-birthed progenitor, haunted by ectoplasmic low-end murmur. Seaworthy - seemingly enchanted by early-period Windy and Carl and SotL - veer from the ethereal toward the internal, more concerned with micro-textures, the hollowed resonance of bowed instrumentations and stretched tonalities sparser, almost forlorn in its glassy reverbs. “Near And Faraway,” the collaboration, is the standout, though; more Orsi-oriented than Seaworthy, long-form tendrils of guitars and synthetics snake out into a nebula of micro-symphonic chords. Halfway through, the mist clears allowing guitar source to bare itself coyly before the tonehaze rolls in again, plumes of guitar mounting, before melting out to birdsong.
 To is Dane P Jørgensen's second coming after a promising debut you read about first here on furthernoise. The promise is fulfilled here, Jørgensen still dallying with the indeterminate, but more purposeful in navigating the intersection with composition. His processing is far from clinical click tricks, sounds seeming alchemized into luminous streams of tone, orchestrated (or perhaps chambered) into subtle crystalline harmonics - cycling tones of vertical colour. Apparently static surface textures with a secret life of harmonic movement nods at Phill Niblock, though Jørgensen is less drily inquiry-driven, more emotionally engaged. In a lean set for a usually jowly genre, Jørgensen is more focused than the average drone-anist, his compositional prowess in the service of concision, he homes in on timbre, evoking the aura of morning mist or the long drawn out rays of light (see debut). An elegant lulling music of low attack and deferred decay, of faux-woodwinds and ersatz-organs periodically inflected with delicate oscillations; a warm, balmy flow of harmonised drones and earthy texture fields that variously reminds of Stephan Mathieu and the pastoral chorales of Mountains. “Variation I” and "Variation II" resonate like compounds from Fripp/Eno's index of metals, and overall To ranges between the intimacy of Andrew Chalk and the thousand-yard stare of Paul Bradley. Minimal frequency and pitch shifts act as linear punctuations of chronostatic scenes, its elegiac lilts eloquent testament to Low Point's shared methodology of acoustic/organic sources electronically transformed and endowed with newly vibrant emotional resonance.
Review by Alan Lockett
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