Texture:: — a compilation of minimal ambient guitar
First, a few words on the label. Texture is the first release of SloBor Media, a new label founded by Jason Sloan and Matt Borghi (who both feature on the comp – check the review of Borghi’s latest “solo” album here). The aim is primarily to release their own music. They won’t say no to good artists who submit their material, though. All releases will be limited and come out in hand-packaged designs. SloBor does not mean to focus on music only: they also want to publish art books, DVD, set up exhibitions, etc.
Texture:: A compilation of minimal ambient guitar. What is ambient guitar? For those who know a little ambient music, the concept of such a genre being played with a guitar might be puzzling... A good way of seeing ambient guitar might be to link it with drones. Bands like Sunn 0))) (review here) and Stars of the lid (here) perform drone music on guitars and have both been qualified ambient. But with Texture we’re speaking pure ambient. Technically, you seem to have quite a large set-up to perform such music. A fine example is Matt Borghi’s. In the liner notes, he describe it this way: “a 1979 fender gemini iie with seymour-duncan pick up through a daisy-chained set up that used an alesis nanoverb, a dell lattitude running audio-mulch, and an apple ibook running ableton’s live into an hp desktop using cool edit pro; various plug-ins were utilised on all platforms”. Most of the musicians featured on the comp do use an e-bow, it shouldn’t come as a surprise...
On to the music in itself. Unsurprisingly, what we get here are mostly soundscapes. But they are quite varied: it ranges from the very peaceful to the more tempestuous (well, sort of) to the very dark.
Exuviae sounds like a majestic river flowing very slowly in a landscape of rocky hills. Jeff Pearce is one of the most renowned musicians in here and his piece called Harbinger is the abstract audial version of the sound of waves washing the beach of a desert island. Alan Imber’s piece is much darker. It was inspired by “negative world news” and you can hear his wariness of what might come next. Matt Borghi’s Lansing is very close to abstract music and almost “discordant”, which brings a nice change. Anomalous disturbances offers a very fluid and cold piece, a little “prickly” and quite intimidating. Eric Kesner, the man behind True colour of blood boasts to be a guitar purist and claims that “Form, melody, rhythm, chords: these words represent nothing but rules, barriers and walls which only serve to limit the places where "music" can exist or reach towards”. Let me just say that rhythms are no barriers, the talented will always find a way to break the rules and work on new rhythmic patterns. Too daunting a task for Kesner? This being said, his track his a very fine example of dark and contemplative ambient.
13 tracks (not a single bad one), 70 minutes + running time. This might sound very long, if not dull, to many people. Ambient freaks will love this, but what about others? Well, this is not “music for the masses” but it still is highly likeable. I own a couple of ambient-affiliated records, I like them a lot but just don’t seem to be spinning them on regular basis. However, Texture is one of my fav CD of the last two weeks: perfect when I study or when I get to bed and know I’m gonna suffer from yet another insomnia. It is also a perfect record to let you mind wander a bit and think about a lot of things.
Texture is limited to 100 copies and is housed in a white digipak with a printed velum slip sleeve. Each copy will include a portion of a used guitar string from one of the artists on the compilation.