One could go on all day about such stuff, I guess. The album, anyhow, these Mandible Chatter people: coupla guys named Neville and Grant with a keen, mean ear for the median between soothing and menacing. This isn’t Pete Namlook ambience, nor Steve Roach, though Robert Rich produced it, which makes for a great and interesting tension between the artists and their producer. The band themselves seem to have a Controlled Bleeding/Nocturnal Emissions/more-organically-minded Chris & Cosey groove in mind: “dark ambient” in spirit, maybe, though I am coining “electro no-clash ambient” to describe the backward-glancing some-drums-but-not-so-much,-thanks preference to whose presence I mean to refer. But Robert Rich: he’s a mainstay of the excellent if sometimes unintentionally hilarious NPR syndicated program Music From Hearts of Space, which I listen to at least every other week and which I love unabashedly, even if its host’s vocal inflections do seem like an audio-dictionary illustration of what one might mean by the term “New Age.” So what, though? Judging people for the way they talk stopped being funny ages ago. (Just to be clear about things, though: judging people for being hippies is still fair game.) When I hear me some Robert Rich on Hearts of Space, I drift off. That’s kind of the point. |
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