Nate Scheible — Plume

Experimental soundscape artist Nate Scheible has releases dating back to the early 00's.  His newest album Plume is a cassette release (like many of his other releases throughout the years) on Warm Winters Ltd.  His preference for the cassette medium pairs well with his love of analog timbres and soft, ear-massaging noise.

The first of the eight untitled pieces consists of fragments of dramatic and cinematic chords, the sort of lush string, choir and saw pads one might hear on Berlin school or space ambient releases, here abbreviated and choked off at irregular intervals, for a 'deconstructed' remix feel not unlike the work of Vladislav Delay or Oval.

The flickering, obliterated effect continues to an extent, with shivering, degraded tones sketching out melancholic chord progressions, with a texture not unlike William Basinski's Disintegration Loops.  There are also smoother, uninterrupted pads as well, however, and from here we move into a more elegant idiom of melodic ambient that often reminds me of various artists released on Cyclic Law.

Unlike many releases oriented around pads and heavy reverb, the pace of this recording is very fast, with each of the tracks lasting two- to- four minutes on average, and the full album lasting twenty-eight minutes.  The occasional sudden cuts to dead silence lend the recording a gestural musique concrete sensibility.  It never fades into the backdrop, never dwelling on any sound for long, although a prevailing mood of rainy melancholia persists.

Meticulous processing results in some incredible sounds, striking a poetic balance between scrambled glitchiness and sweet tunefulness.  Each note seems to consist of several components: a rustle of phasing noise, a human voice, a saw wave, a faintly saturated contrail of delay.  Many of the tracks on the album could be described as heavily distorted, and yet all harsh parts have been sculpted and softened, so that these annihilated sounds are gentle to the ear, and seem to resonate in tune.

The final piece, longest on the recording at nearly 6 minutes, begins rather eerily with a lonely flute-like tone over a bed of rain sounds.  The album's quietest moments are its darkest; often an unsettling emptiness is filled with a swell of melodic feedback or synth.  As the track develops into a glimmering sphere of tuneful drones and resonances, I continue to be reminded of Oval, who similarly processed sounds into total unrecognizability without removing their innate melodicism, and discovering hidden tonalities in the process.

I thoroughly enjoyed this recording, which combines an academic ambient aesthetic like I would hear from labels such as 12k or Line with a gothic, dramatic emotional flair to its moody progressions of pads.  With its concise pacing and thoughtful flow, it is a pleasantly repeatable experience.  The at-times startling forays into field recordings and musique concrete realms keep the overall experience engaging.