Dirk Series — Fluctuation Of Being

Fluctuation Of Being is Dirk Serries' first foray into full-on ambience since 2018’s Epitaph. It’s a guitar & effects-based album highlighting both his skill and atmospheric scope within the ambient form. Over the five featured tracks, he moves from slowly growing drone matter, through to drifting ambience, onto felt & forlorn moodscapes.

The CD album appears on Germany’s Midira Records. It comes presented in a four-panel mini gatefold- which on its outside features what looks like a close-up colour photo of vegetation & roots locked within either frost or ice. It can be purchased directly from the label here 

 

We open with just over twelve and a half minutes of“Nothingness” here Serries slowly but surely builds a vast & baying wall of drone matter, which sits somewhere between the sweepingly grand & glowingly felt. By track three “Confinement” and its near eight-minute unfold- we find ourselves in a floating in gliding and ebbing guitar tone- which both circles, sweeps, and lightly harmonically jangles its way along.

The longest track here is the fourth “Despairing Object” which comes in at dead on the sixteen-minute mark. It moves from felt, at points forlorn sweeps. Onto to ebbing & expanding drone fields, through to billowing & drifting pitch glides- which are half lost & half hopeful.

 

Serries has been active since the 1980s in the wider European experimental genre, with his sonic interest moving harsh industrial music, ambience, and on to improv/ abstract jazz in recent years. So, it’s nice to see him once again returning to the ambient form with Fluctuation Of Being, and it most certainly shows he hasn’t lost his knack for the form- as it’s both a skilled & engaging album, that rewards replays.