Sufjan Stevens previewed the next installment of his Convocations project with “Lamentation II,” an ambient instrumental piece featuring muted electronics and chrome-plated synth. He paired the song with a visualizer filled with comet-like streaks of rainbow color.
Convocations is a five-volume series dedicated to Stevens’ biological father, who died in September — two days following the release of his 2020 record, The Ascension. Each installment of the album is themed around a different stage of the mourning process — a statement describes the project as “five sonic cycles exploring loss, isolation and anxiety,...
Convocations is a five-volume series dedicated to Stevens’ biological father, who died in September — two days following the release of his 2020 record, The Ascension. Each installment of the album is themed around a different stage of the mourning process — a statement describes the project as “five sonic cycles exploring loss, isolation and anxiety,...
- 4/13/2021
- by Ryan Reed
- Rollingstone.com
As the title indicates, the music on the debut album from a Seattle ambient-drone maestro (who apparently doesn't like giving out his birth name) sounds as besotted with My Bloody Valentine (whose 1990 Ep was also called Glider) as with Gas, the influential, atmospheric minimalist electronica project of German techno producer Wolfgang Voigt. Those acts form the clear coordinates for Glider's 49 warm, pulsating minutes, in which heavily treated guitar nuzzles up to enveloping laptop-generated haze and a just-submerged four-on-the-floor kick-drum pulse. (There's also a free three-song Ep available at ghostly.com, none of which is repeated on the album.) Played low in the background, it all merges together, which is surely the point, but crank it and the tracks' discrete details emerge, such as the pointillist single-note guitar and carefully sculpted overtones of "Dour," or the glacial harmonics that swirl over the top of "A Fractured Smile." Sure,...
- 11/11/2008
- by Michaelangelo Matos
- avclub.com
If the notion of a German enterprise tasked with alchemizing sound into something like vapor doesn't excite you, it should. That was effectively the premise behind Gas, one of many projects marshaled by Wolfgang Voigt before he started the epochal electronic label Kompakt. From its inception in the mid-'90s, Gas music has tried to conjure the mysterious depths of the German forest—the streaks of light and pockets of darkness that fizz between trees that breathe. On the four albums bundled into the reissue box set Nah Und Fern, the results have been beautiful and unnerving. The Gas sound is all about the changing same, with long washes of ambient textures and a sublimated pulse that evokes techno without sounding the least bit literally danceable. Glimmers of brass and strings wander in from old traditional German songs, but mostly, it's a magisterial sound that begs listeners to get lost.
- 6/10/2008
- by Andy Battaglia
- avclub.com
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