Slowcream — And
I guess ‘And’ as a whole would be the kind of thing you’d expect to find on Norwegian classical music meets electroinca label Miasmah, but this has less electronic elements than you’d find on a Miasmah; & also though it’s dark, it’s a often alot more quirky playful & shifting than Miasmah catalogues output. As well as the mainly sampled & manipulated elements there are ‘real’ cellos and organs played on a few tracks by Greg Haines(who put his debut out on Miasmah a years back).
As a whole the albums sound is often very schizophrenic & darting as the various sample layers drifting & move over each other; sometimes it works & is quite effective (in a multi-emotional way), but sadly more offten than not it doesn’t. For example one layer of dramatic strings will sudden be up against horn down blurst & it sounds wrong, off pitch & almost painful- like hearing two bit’s of separate music at the same time. Another problem that pops up more often is that the tracks lack any harmonic or dramatic centre for the listener to grab onto- meaning you offten can't tell where on track ends & another starts
Certainly the idea of sampling and manipulating classical & film score samples in the way Slowcream are trying here is textural rather interesting; giving this strange often slowly chaotic lush sonic place to dwell in. But sadly more often than not Slowcream are not thinking about the listener or entertainment(which is highly important) in all of their layering & over lapping of samples with too much of this lacking focus, sonic control & graceful harmonics for the listener to grab onto.