JDG - Living Underground [Cohort Records - 2008]Living underground is an ambient/ field recording cross breed, which as it’s title suggest takes all of it’s sound elements from field recordings of underground tube stations and other subterranean urban spaces then manipulates them into atmospheric and deep sounding expanses. The album features four tracks in all, each around the 15 to 20 minute mark, totalling in all just over and hour deep, vast and often omnibus sonic fair. Track one starts off quite active and shifting in it’s make up, with all manner of mechanic groaning and echoed sound, bird sound , ect-giving the feeling of descending away from the surface and all it’s familiar and comforting sounds. By the second track you feel a lot further down, away from the surface and alone- the tones are deeper, more stretched out, echoed and less distintictive. It's more drifting, vast and eerier in it’s make up. Track three is a return to the more mechanically/train rail like tones of the first track but instead of been shifting in tone it concentrates on stretching out this grating train track like tone. Sending it off back and forward towards you and away into the expansive darkness like a ghost train shifting in and out of an deep underground tunnel. Track four takes a similar tact as track three, but users a few tones which are echoed and bounded around, it has a more hallucinogenic feel to it as the tones dreamily and eerier a mass around you. A rewarding & atmospheric journey into subterranean tone manipulation that mangers to nicely suck you deep down below everyday life into an eerier, hallucinogenic and strange often nocturnal world. Roger Batty
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