This record release is part of the netlabel collection: EARTH MANTRA
Date: 2012-04-14
„Listeners will note that the music tends towards the experimental, with strong touches of electro-acoustic music and dark, wintry ambience. While listening, we visualize stark vistas of unending glaciers, cold winds cutting across broad expanses of snow, trees without leaves bending under the weight of crystalline ice, trains quietly threading their way through a vast wilderness of white, and mountain peaks jutting majestic through the clouds. The interpretation is in the ear of the beholder, of course, but we find this music both somber and uplifting, both bleak and beautiful, both moving and soothing, a sage encapsulation of all the myriad aspects of our natural and modern world. Truly, Stefan has created some of the finest abstract ambience we have heard in some time, the perfect sort of music for deep contemplation or relaxation by a crackling fire. In his music, Stefan brings to the listener what he calls „psychogeography drifts“, ambient journeys that are based on the sounds of extensive travels throughout the world, but morphed into expansive compositions that tease the senses and free the mind to dream.“
Paulus presents the section as an “all aboard”, an invitation to explore the world while traveling through the recesses of the mind...The dreamer diappears like a phantasm of the environment; the back story becomes the lead. In the final seven minutes (one-third of the track), a beep and drone melody peers from the subliminal like a sprite from beneath a mushroom... The journey ends with a return to civilization and the feeling that something internal has changed – if not on a molecular level, at least on the spiritual. (Richard Allen, A Closer Listen)
"When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere image of itself. The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment, "ordinary life" may prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation. Every game takes place within the boundaries of its own spatial domain". The so-called "derive" resounds in the three moments of this becoming, a kind of narrative sequence of long-lasting field recordings which have been injected with entrancing sine waves, electronic rarefied atmospheres and humoral resonances so that it seems an emphatic cruise across a nebula of daily aural stimulations: the overwhelming solipsism combined with a certain feeling of self-alienating during a train trip in "Becoming-Endless", the glacial lethargy and the freezing surges in "Becoming-Imperceptible", the entrancing absorption of the ego within a natural landscape, emphasized by heavy rain, nocturnal chirring of cicadas and the blowing of strong winds over a wintry land, in "Becoming-Molecular" are the daydreaming stages of this suggestive dissolving. "Becoming-Dissolve" is available for free on Earth Mantra's net-label web-site. (CHAIN DLK)
