Nickolas Mohanna — Transmission Hue

As winter clouds and temperatures roll in, I am increasingly grateful for albums like Nickolas Mohanna's "Transmission Hue", a wonderful addition to my library of ambient synth music, to be filed with Steve Roach, Tangerine Dream or Biosphere.  Though this album is not first and foremost 'comfort music', to refer to it as such would not be grossly unfair.  It must be stressed that there is no new age cheese here, but nothing dark or unpleasant rears its head either.  The warmth and reassuring slow pulsation of the music, which seems to mimic waves lapping a shore, should draw many listeners in right away.  From this initial listenability, one comfortably becomes acquainted with the intense emotional underpinnings of the music, none too obvious at first.

Mohanna, in the modern style, is content to let his pieces be 'clouds' of tone rather than distinct progressions, but unlike many an ambient artist to employ similar tonal 'clouds', he doesn't mask the sounds of the synthesizers deep within layers of filter and reverb.  Quite analog machines boldly sing out glorious buzz, lovingly modulated into radiant images of passion and nostalgia ("Dialogues") or chemical soporific delirium ("Thin Ice").

The way Mohanna employs phasing is like light playing on the surface of water.  The wash of aqua-grey color on the cover of the album, while pleasant and synaesthetically aligned with the music on the album, cannot express the complexity and multifaceted beauty of these lovingly sculpted waveforms.  The album is peppered with moments in which oscillating layers of sound begin to stretch and drift apart like fraying string, and it's suddenly obvious just how many tracks have been piled on top of each other to form these mixes.  Because of these moments, it's all the more impressive is that the listener often cannot help but process the sound as the voice of a single instument.

A great deal of the album is warm synth drone, the style Mohanna wastes no time in establishing with opener "Dialogues", but there are a couple notable breaks from this sound.  As the second track "Gishiki" begins, crisp noise bursts gust in and out as if degraded recordings broadcast via handheld radio from some windswept coastal location.  The texture of the sound proves slightly too clean to be a true field recording.  This skillful imitation of organic sound is one of many examples of excellent synthesis throughout this record.

Just when we have "Of Lethe" pegged as another "Dialogues", the synths fade away, and the lonely, tarnished clank of bells materializes in arrhythmia out of a soft wind in a breathless closure to the piece.  These same sounds reorient themselves into a violent, hurricane-torn sound space to introduce "Configurations in Placing Sky", the lengthy album closer.  A vibrating, muffled and battered whine almost like some kind of underwater struggle holds the track together until the familiar, slightly metallic chordal drone that dominates the album can return after 4 minutes or so have passed.  The emotions here are more painful this time, like the heartache of missing a loved one.

Nickolas Mohanna's debut "Transmission Hue" is a beautiful and mature creation of density and substance that should be remembered as a great ambient record.  It is yet another "thematic" ambient album, which is to say it starts to get predictable after a couple songs because many of the tracks are aurally and sonically very similar.  This can be a good thing if you're looking for music to relax to, but some listeners may crave more diversity.  The depth of each composition is such that listening to the album is a comfortable and unified experience.  To my ears this music sounds ironically less calculated, sequenced or sterile than certain old Tangerine Dream or Brian Eno records credited with the birth of the ambient  genre.  I highly recommend cocooning yourself in your room, turning the heat up and giving this album a good listen this winter.