Maurizio Bianchi & Maor Appelbaum — Environmental Meditations

Environmental Meditations is collaboration between long time Italian Noise/ ambient artist Maurizio Bianchi & Israeli electronic experimental artist Maor Appelbaum, to make an album that is a halfway house between ambience and noise. Feeling very much like the title suggests literal meditations on the environment, due to the type and texture of sounds used to conjurer up the feeling of composed natural forces such as wind, water or fire, etc.

It Comes off like a less rhythmic and not so detailed version  of some of Aube’s material. The disk offers up six tracks, all moving towards the 15 minute, and while there are some satisfying and denser elementary bound sound worlds here, plus a few epic and rich harmonic moments. Sadly for the most part the tracks seems to create an theme with-in the first few minutes, then stay pretty much in the same place for the rest of the tracks running time. Never really building up or growing depth of  sound. Some of the tracks even border on been plain boring, as the same elements are seemly looped on and on for ever with little artistic merit.

A Rather disappointing effort from a well recognised and influence noise figure, but maybe it’s down to this been collaboration, as with some Merzbow Collaborations this clear doesn’t work or jell in an enjoyable manner.