T. Gowdy — Miracles

Timothy Gowdy is an experimental musician, producer, and audio/visual artist from Canada. He sang choral music professionally as part of the American Boychoir in Princeton, before going on to study classical guitar. He also achieved a Masters in Sound Recording from the Schulich School of Music in Montreal, Quebec. Since leaving University in 2007 he has produced and engineered over seventy albums for artists as diverse as Ada Lea and SUUNS. His first album as a recording artist, B-Stock, was released in 2018 and he has been incredibly busy ever since, recording another five full-length albums including this one and being responsible for various audio/visual installations around the world. 

Miracles is Gowdy’s 6th album in total and represents the latest step in his musical career. The album opens with "350J" a short but sweet hypnotic wall of distorted noise that leads us into the first song proper, the album’s title track, "Miracles", starts off like an Orb-esque slice of ambient electronica that builds slowly before a distorted synth line enters the fray. "Déneigeuse", on the other hand is an electronic drum-based piece with some pretty synth lines flowing around that central drum track. "Transcend I" is a chilled ambient piece that serves as the beginning of a longer two-part piece that concludes with the album’s final track. This is followed by "U4A", another Orb-esque track that harks back to the U.F.Orb era in the early 90s, it features some really nice, hypnotic synth lines that form the central core of the piece with other drones and synth lines floating around It in a loose, relaxed style. "Vidisions", immediately picks up the pace with a driving electronic beat that forms the song’s basis, electronic drones play in the background, however that drumbeat is the song’s core, occasionally deviating in its sound, it remains the one constant across the whole track. The penultimate track, "Clipse", is another track built around a strong drum pattern that slowly builds across its length as more and more synth lines are added to the mix, some to give the track background ambience, others to reinforce and mutate the drum sound. The album closes with the second part of the Transcend duology, "Transcend II", a fitting closer to the album that encompasses everything that has gone before it. Great hypnotic synth drums patterns that hold the thing together with some fairly sparse ambient synth lines flowing around it to create something quite beautiful and ethereal.

Miracles is a beautiful album of ambient electronica that works perfectly as a 38-minute-long piece, each track flowing effortlessly into the next. Gowdy has used all of his studio experience to create an album that works on so many different levels, it’s both the sort of music you can listen to in the background while you work, but also the sort of music you can immerse yourself in, picking up all the little nuances that float in and around the core of the songs. Classic 90s era ambient music seems to be the album’s driving force, however, it doesn’t feel old or dated, instead sounding fresh and of the moment. If you enjoy ambient electronica, this one is a must.