The second and latest release from the collaborative project Soft Generator (Audiobulb’s UK-based curator David Newman and US-based composer Erik Schoster), is a continuously-evolving edifice divided into four tracks, each carrying a linguistic segment of the work’s title, Ack Now Ledge. 

In the “Ack” phase, we enter a field of clicks and repetitive structures, ushered along by a warm wash of synth-based landscapes. This cosy sonic blanket is quickly torn from us by the proceeding track, “Know,” which brings rhythmic patterns to the fore, highlighted by a voice repeating single-digit numbers, sometimes in succession, other times rather out of order. The self-conscious move to foreground the inherent layers and patterns is indeed a kind of “knowing,” as the baseline of wave-like compositions begins to ascend and then slowly pulls themselves apart by the track’s end, unfolding in real-time while revealing each layer as but a naked surface of discrete material. The distant hum of watery gurgles keeps the compositional dirge afloat, often in harmony, and then suddenly out of sync, bringing the carefully-mediated background to the surface of this supple illustration. 

Ack Now Ledge is nothing if not a narrated journey, which involves being submerged under the pressure of a reservoir of competing sweeps, reminiscent of later Stars of the Lid or Stephan Mathieu – a wave formation that acknowledges at each moment that it is but a wave, breaking, crashing, and gathering its pieces once again in the final moments amidst strings and field recordings to wish us “good morning.”