Warble — Swarm

Swarm servers up two hoovering ’n’ hazing sound works, which blends & blurs together greyed ambience with woozy impro. Each of the two tracks here come in around the eighteen-minute mark, and together they create a fairly short-if-moodily gloomy, if at points lightly grating album. 

This album appeared late summer last year on Inexhaustible Editions-it was released either digital or CD, I’m writing up about the former. The CD comes presented in a black and white six-panel fold digipak, this features creepy inverted images of sea birds hovering above the sea.  The whole packaging is a nicely moody affair, very much focusing on the eerier and unsettling side of the album.

Warble is a two-piece project bringing together American now based in Berlin Brad Henkel on trumpet and effects. And German Miako Klein on tenor, basset and Paetzold recorder, effects. Swarm is the two pieces second release after 2016 Ama- which saw the duo collaborating with MDuo.
 
The album opens with "Glean"- which to start with brings together a swirling mesh of hovering ‘n’ billowing wind instrumentation, low down buzzing, reedy bubbling, breathy and whistling hisses. Initially, it sounds akin to sneaking through a cave full of slumbering and snoozing dragons. In the second half, more rhythmic ticks and saws are added into mix- as things turn a lot more manic and skittering, though we play out on layers of honky hover- which are both haunting and waveringly wonky.
 
Finally, we have “Sort Sol”- this opens with a strange moody blend of hissing air and lashing water type tones, as we move on, we start to make out wayward whistles, knocks, and ratting tones, creating this sort of organic instrument led dark ambient vibe. By around the sixth-minute mark more pitch drifting recorder bays ‘n’ sways are added into the mix- giving the whole thing a very woozy & alien vibe. With further on more seared wails & warbling trumpet tones appear in the mix, to deepen the feeling of wavering unease.
 
 
Swarm is a very difficult album to fully tie down into either moody Impov or ambient- meaning it’s very much of an intriguing hybrid. I will certainly be interested in hearing if Warble continues down on this path in future releases, and quite where it takes them. To find out more/ buy direct follow this link