Nebris — Bleak Angels

The mystery surrounding the identity and background of Nebris is mirrored by the dark, mysterious sounds coming from Bleak Angels. The feeling emanating from the binary surface of this cd is pleasantly slow yet discomforably vague. The man behind Nebris is surprisingly unfindable by the modern machinations of Google and such, but it appears to be someone by the name of James Hamilton.

With buildingblocks like amplified organic and geologic materials, but also more 'conventional' musical instruments (like a Tibetan thighbone trumpet and kora), Hamilton produces less conventional sounds, carefully layered into a hazy drone. Technically there's 50 minutes of hisses and hush atmospherics, with a few crackles to disturb the hallucinatory but steady drone. "Noise for lovers", if it weren't for the oppressive desolation that this soundscape manages to create in the mind of the listener.

Not as subtle as say Francisco López, but it's also far from being noise. Nebris creates a subdued ambience but on the other hand it slowly builds into a more noisy finale of the third track (named IV). Yet nowhere it gets as dense to take away the sense of emptiness and well, silence. And that's where the real paradox of this music lies: it suggests silence by means of sound. You tend to feel like watching a movie with the sound turned off and that's what makes this an interesting listen.