ea001 - Exuviae - Jamais Vu

IkEcht - Songsoverruins (c) 2008
And Dark Winter keeps on branching out... after launching the smaller sublabel Rotten Crab, which focusses on experimental racket, Endless Ascent was launched at the beginning of September. Here the focus will be on lighter ambient and spacey music. This, too, is a .net label, so all their albums will be freely downloadable under the CC-license. The first contribution comes from Exuviae, the project of Brooks Rongstad from Minnesota. He, in his turn, just launched a small .net label. Apart from that he also forms the duo Subseason with Nathan Larson of Dark Winter. As you can read, there's a lot of cross-pollination going on here.

Jamais Vu, the opposite of a déjà vu, is a compilation of earlier works which have been revisited, as well as previously unreleased material. In contrast to the recent collaboration with Kenji Siratori on Dark Winter this is lighter ambient. Eight tracks with over an hour of music, the last track alone accounting for 20 minutes, is what is being served. The album kicks off nicely with "Doorway Alight" which slowly washes over you with warm and tender sounds. Apart from tracks two and six, where some rhythms are sparingly applied, this characterises the sound of most of the album.

Some songs don't really do it for me, such as "Jamais Vu" which keeps revolving around the same repetitive sound structures for seven minutes. But apart from the album opener, tracks like "Along The Way", "Remainder" or the 20-minute finale "How We Are Finite" have this same etherical quality to it, luckily without throwing new-age clichés like whale sounds in the mix. Yes, you could dismiss this as "puppy music", but I say that this needs its time and place. When you're emotionally drained this is music to chill out to. Those who are into the Italian space ambient act Oöphoi (just to mention something obscure) will likely enjoy the more etherical tracks on this album.

Originally written for the Dutch weblog IkEcht (http://ikecht.web-log.nl/ikecht/), English translation by the author.




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Endless Ascent releases are free to download under a Creative Commons License.