Deaf Center — Reverie

Deaf Center are the duo of Norwegians Erik Skodvin and Otto Totland, existing since the early 2000's. This new album, Reverie, is the first release in six years. The two-track release a live album, performed at the anniversary show for their label, Sonic Pieces- with each track hitting around the seventeen mintue mark.

Their music could be said to be instrumental ambient, with performances for horns, strings, and piano wrapped in a cocoon of verb. The first of the two sides begins with distant, moody melancholic piano, loosely repeating a cinematic melody with heavy electronic delay. The music is consistent in its rain-drenched minor tonalities, never deviating from a tragic, sombre mood. It's improvisatory but cohesive, made up of countless fragments of melodic ideas, resonating together in a tonal structure not quite solid enough to be a chord progression, but consonant and smooth nonetheless.

Though the instrumental tones are well produced and pleasant, I find it to represent a mood I need not dwell in, and find its lack of movement or change generally perturbing. It feels generally unformed and lacking in progression or ideas, a thousand half-melodies derived from the same chord. Though there are some inspired moments from the piano, which have a kind of gothic, ancient energy, it seems like these are destined to dissipate without the mood or underlying chord changing, as if momentum is impossible to achieve within this space.

All in all, a nice sounding release but too conservative and traditional with the ideas, sounding not unlike a minor key, rainy day variation of Music for Airports, with a sort of meandering directionlessness with the exception of a couple inspired melodies. Artists such as Kyle Bobby Dunn and Stars of the Lid have used similar techniques to create ambient symphonic works with defined emotional arcs and dramatic shifts. To my ears, Deaf Center have the tone of the music fluently established, but could use more substance to the content of their music, at least in the case of this live performance. For more