The other cassette by Lamour Records is perhaps a bit of an oddball for this label, which for me always hints towards pop. It is a compilation with drone music from the Ukraine, as compiled by Dao de Noize (of whom we reviewed music before). Two cassettes, twice eighty minutes equals a lot of drone music by lots of people I never heard of
SiJ takes the episode out from the darkness into the holy light with ‘Infinitas’, a heavenly work of angelic delight that fits sunrises and sunsets just as much as it fits blissful thoughts and beauty. Wonderful.
This new release from Cryo Chamber is a collaboration between Textere Oris and SiJ which could be classified in the path of the recent releases from this label as it's focused on illustration of musical story where field recordings have a key role. This kind of sounds are used as a way to portray something that could not be seen, an usual technique used in cinema.
That out of the way, it should be pointed out that the album is quite good. Sij and Textere Oris have managed to capture a warm, meditative sound without resorting to the typical New Age “Zen garden” instrumentation. Yes, warm. Tracks like “Lost” and “In the Rain” combine deep pads with field recordings into full soundscapes that blend well into the background but can hold your attention if you choose to focus on them. In the rain in particular draws on a Dropsonde-era Biosphere influence. The music is melodic without containing distinct melodies that pull you out of the larger, open experience.
The album takes off in a rather evasive and beautiful ambient way. You can dream away on dreamy sounds, reminding me of the chants of whales. Some fragmented vocals also join in, but the main characteristic of this work appears to be the use of multiple field recordings. It feels like a sonic discovery moving from forests to aquatic passages. The production has been accomplished with some heavy basting sound treatments and depressed piano passages. The work becomes progressively colder and even a bit hostile. You rapidly realize that “Reflections Under The Sky” is digging towards the darkest aspects of life. The work is achieved by a surprising and somewhat surreal mix of noises and atmospheres, which are now like symbolizing the beauty in life and then its horror side.
I’ve always pondered what makes a particular genre album “better” than the others. There’s a good deal of subjectivity in play here—what works for me might not for someone else—but I suspect there’s more to it than that. I listen to and write about a lot of dark ambient music, and it’s still hard to try to describe why I like a certain album more than others, especially when they play by such similar rules. Reflections under the Sky is a fitting example of this. The debut from SiJ (Vladislav Sikach) and Textere Oris (Ilya Fursov) sounds, on the surface, like countless other genre efforts: somber keyboards waft to and fro over field recordings of rain and static, with the odd bit of treated guitar drone and other filtered and pitched effects gently snaking their way through the mix. In some places, such as “Behind the Window,” the music’s a dead ringer for past classics: in the case of this track, Brian Lustmord and Robert Rich‘s seminal album, Stalker. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, first because Stalker is rife with brilliant yet desolate passages, and because the template Sikach and Fursov follow is a time-tested and time-proven one.
The forty-five minutes of ambient-electronic sound presented on Reflections Under the Sky suggest that its collaborators are very clearly kindred spirits. Composed between 2014 and 2015, the album documents what happens when you pool the collective talents of Moscow, Russia-based electronic music producer Ilya Fursov (aka Textere Oris) and self-taught Ukrainian artist Vladislav Sikach (aka SiJ). It's pitched as a “field recordings-focused release,” but while that's not wholly inaccurate the soundworld featured on Reflections Under the Sky extends far beyond the realm of a standard field recordings project. Further to that, a scan of the production details implies as much when the two are credited with synthesizer, keyboards, contact mics, noises, guitar, percussion, toy piano, voice, and sampling. It would be more correct to state that the recording achieves a carefully considered balance between musical elements and real-world environmental sounds.
SiJ (Vladislav Sikach) is a dark ambient artist from Ukraine. He has built an impressive body of work, with over thirty compositions since he embarked on his journey back in 2011. SiJ creates many tracks which feature other ambient producers, including Robert Rich in his more recent work. For Cryo Chamber’s latest release, Reflections under the sky, SiJ teams up with Textere Oris (Ilya Fursov from Moscow) for both of their debuts on the label. Their first interaction involved Oris re-mastering the title track of SiJ’s album The End. It is from this re-worked song both artists forged an ambient duo. This album marks their first full-length joint effort.
Reflections Under The Sky is a gentle listen, the focus on field recordings of rain and water lulling the mind while the echoes and beats wash over the listener. I always tend to lean toward dark ambient albums that use nature recordings and other “real world” sounds as accompaniment to their darker tones, so from the start, I felt quite warmly towards this album. A striking example of this can be found in the track “Lost”, a track that begins with a blaring horn-type sound and then features the sounds of birdsong and the empty interference patterns of a de-tuned radio. Sacral vocals begin to ebb and flow around a deeper beat, painting the picture of someone lost in nature, far from technology or other people. There are other sounds too, snatches of voices, drums, footsteps and thunder but all conspire to paint a lonely, possibly hallucinatory picture.
Released on Halloween, Death Season 5 marks the fifth annual installment of this compilation series from Minneapolis, MN experimental noise imprint Darker Days Ahead. This edition puts forth a little over 45 minutes of material from an international roster of artists—some of which have been active since the '90s, while others seem to have built momentum over the past two to five years. Fensch Industrial Orkestra + Flutwacht (Germany) get the ball rolling with "Perfekt/Defekt," which combines clanging, machinated percussive textures and fits of aggressive distortion and feedback with dense rumbles and some obfuscated spoken samples for a demonstration of harsh noise done right—possessing just enough variety and intrigue to create a sense of atmosphere. Longstanding Czech project Napalmed follows with "111104_RK2," another harsh track—more chaotic/less structured—utilizing lots of quick shifts between varying levels of heavy-duty effects that occasionally drop out to metallic scraping sounds. It kind of creates this vision of the artist scraping dense metal into a mic that's running through a series of pedals as he stomps on and off the effects at random. It has its moments, even if it doesn't align with my personal tastes.
SIJ's original member and founder Vladislav Sikach adds up in this 2015 "Way to Dream" recordings a full amount of guests, some already been invited in other projects and some new ones. This fact adds up good results , not only by the presence of Robert Rich in the guest list but in quality, intensity, creativity and "richness" in the electronic musical language. The title of this release (not exactly its cover art's depiction) is actually what you get. A series of trips through a varied kind of an ocean, river, pathway, road or whatever, towards oniric landscapes full of sonic details and tempo changes, to make it both attractive and slow/mid paced dynamic, as dreams are in fact (no frantic nightmares on this one).
For instance, there’s the aforementioned blending of acoustic and electric sound—a mixture of the ancient and the modern. The sound reminds me a lot of the wave of ‘tribal’ or ‘ethno-industrial’ that happened in the early to mid-nineties with artists like OYuki Conjugate, Jorge Reyes, Hybryds, and Alio Die—music inspired by (usually non-specific) ancient cultures that knitted those influence into an electronic or experimental frame. Like much of the music of that time, SiJ’s interpretation of the ancient world (or lost world) is surprisingly gentle and pastoral. Its rhythms are relaxed, its melodies flow, and there are no jarring elements to interrupt the idyll. Maybe it’s my usual negativity seeping in, but I feel like this sort of dreaminess conveys very little of the life of the ancient world.
Bring together a dark ambient artist and an ethnomusicologist and give them an ancient Tibetan kingdom as their theme, and you get Zhang Zhung. This release offers two long tracks that cover an hour and twenty minutes, time spent deeply immersed in the sounds of ritual and the sense of the endless vista of the landscape. Gabbasov brings in a host of Tibetan instruments, from airy flutes to the wonderfully cacophonous silnyen (Tibetan cymbals). The ritual would not be complete without throat singing/chant, so you get that as well. The first track, “Bon Sacred Rituals,” carries more of the call-to-prayer aspect. Reminiscent, for me, of the work of Nawang Khechog, the track opens with plaintive cries over a rising drone backdrop from SIJ (Vladislav Sikach). The duo go on to paint a cold and windswept landscape where horns echo in the distance.