The Big Freeze – Various Artists
February 8th, 2007 by rui
There’s a certain type of musician who would take ‘I fell asleep listening to your music’ as a compliment. These (presumably) zen-like creatures who toil for weeks in candlelit studios making heavy-lidded ambient tracks.
Platipus Records have been releasing this electronic music with big synths and world music samples since the beginning of time. Well, not quite that long, but over the last decade or so, they have peppered their dancefloor techno dominated release schedule with tracks and compilations at the slower, spacier end of electronic music. On this double CD, The Big Freeze – first of a new series mixed and compiled by Simon Berry AKA Art Of Trance, they pull together a mixture big names, classic tracks, rising stars and obscurities – almost all of which belong in the ‘press play just before dropping off’ rack at Virgin.
Opening with Jon Hopkin’s complex, etheral, sonic flotation tank of a tune Fairytale, followed by Extrawelt’s Zu Fuss (Muttermix) – a vocoder ballad moves around a beautifully simply chord progression swathed in reverb, sets out the stall in no uncertain terms – it’s going to be a mellow ride.
Kings of Woolworths use a drum kit, but they don’t hit it very hard and L Pierre soon steps in to calm things down with Weirs Way, a gentle, hypnotic beauty segueing into Starseeds’ Elsewhere pulsing and blipping along under a reverbed out female vocal.
Traumvogel is from none other than The Orb – a Glass-lite multilayered looper with a searing lead – simple, emotional machine music, contrasting well with Alex Heffes Touching the Void – a track that comes from the opposite end of the sonic spectrum – using piano and violin to pull us back in time until we land with a bump at a haunting human voice chant. A slow-burning highlight of this first CD.
Jon Hopkins turns up again, this time remixing stablemate Leo Abrahams on the track Spider then Al-pha-X wraps up the first CD with more spacious, drift-off-to-sleep sounds.
A failing of the double CD format is that at this point you have to stir yourself to get up, take CD1 out and pop CD2 into the CD player…
Mint Royale open up the shop with guitars, sweeping strings, pianos, bass guitars and shuffely drums arranged in a very Ritournellish manner, a heavily processed vocal sitting on top of Little Words a track that wouldn’t be out of place over the closing credits of a Bond film. Suitably shaken from the zen-like state induced by CD1, the sudden drop into BT’s 1.618 shows the A-list trancer’s command of the studio – the crispy, clicky, whoompy electronic noises are delicious. But its meandering arrangment means the ingredients end up slightly overcooked – and the flute opening to What I Feel About You by Lawrence Elliot Potter featuring Stella Fairbairn is a welcome relief, as is the rest of this ‘bossa ambiente’ song.
Sleep Will Come from Bliss celebrates its status as an early hours bedtime tune both in name and sound. Hard to prove that string sections playing certain combinations of major, minor and 7th pads, room-filling bass and accordions swirled out with studio effects are conducive to sleep, but hard to deny they make for a highlight on this second CD.
More sleepy tunes (including ANOTHER appearance from Jon Hopkins!) until we get to Behind the Door, by Dr Mottes Euphorhythm. A two chord arpeggio and a sub-bass drone. Nothing else. A near-perfect, minimal ambient classic.
After another visit to L Pierre’s lush string work, the album closes with Nathan Fake’s signature, distorted melodic ambient sound on Bumblechord.
If you don’t have any Jon Hopkins or L Pierre in your collection and are unfamiliar with the Dr Motte track – this really deserves closer attention. And if you’re not that into ambient but like your music blissed out – you could do far worse than this as an introduction.
And don’t worry if you can’t stay awake all the way through to the end.
rx
The Big Freeze is out now on Platipus Records | preview
Note: Track titles link to previews in Windows Media format
