Lumières is a collaborative album between two Hamburg-based sound artists Asmus Tietchens and Alice Freshmouth(aka Tom Fleischhauer). The pair have been friends for the last forty years, and this album finds them offering up a selection of atmospheric soundscapes- which fall between ambience, grey post-industrial moodiness, and bleak/light-churning field recordings.

The CD comes presented in a glossy digipak- on its outside we find two grey boxes overlaying black and white backgrounds, and inside sparse/ abstract white shapes set against a grey sky backdrop.

Each of the eleven tracks has runtimes between three and five minutes- with the tone shifting between vaguely harmonic, to more abstractly ebbing ‘n’ droning. The album opens with “Courbé” which is built around a selection of slowly circling drones- these move between being rising/ mysterious and more glowing/hovering.  Moving on we have the light shifting/ distant ring meets lulling brood scrape of  “Bruit De Nuages”, and the mysterious tunnelling tone meets hauntingly warbling drones of  “Sombre”.

In its second half we move from eerier-but-steady scraping meets forbiddingly glowing flow of “Sous La Lumière”. Though to slurred and warbling seesawing harmonics of  “Lune Souriante”. The album plays out with the light stabbing and darting synth-scaping of “Claire”.

I’m of course very aware of Asmus Tietchens work, as he’s released a large/ impressive body of work since the 1980’s. But seemingly this Alice Freshmouth first work and I must say the pair work well together- so let us hope that Lumières isn’t a one-off collaboration.