Asher — The Depths, the Colours, the objects & the silence

Asher’s The Depths, the Colours, the objects & the silence stands as one of the more stripped-down and eerier releases of the often already minimalist ambient label Mystery Sea. The three tracks here are built around edgy field recordings, slow haunted harmonic synth unfold and a real feeling of disquiet and abandonment.

This really is ambient in it true quiet form and needs to be played in a quite and noise-less environment. The three twenty-minute tracks develop at an organic (snails) pace, often the melodic and haunted harmonic elements not appearing until a good few minutes into the tracks. The real focus here are the crackling, rustling and settling field recordings which could be anything from fire sounds, wind, rain or traffic noise that are built into repetitive, sometime rhythmic and often dense yet quiet sonic scapes. There’s also use of muffled dialogue and other off in the distant sounds that you have to strain to make out. Feeling at times like a more striped down version of some Hoor-paar-Kraat sound collage work, this is ambient music/ sound craft that needs real commitment and time to understand what’s trying to be done here - this is certainly not background music.

An album that grows more rewarding with time as you'll uncover more sound detail and atmospheric sonic detail, giving the listener the feeling of been an intrepid audio explore in an eerier, strange out of focus world.