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Stimulus, "Untitled Landscapes One"
As a whole, this album is a dark journey through dense fog, mist, and pure bleakness: a disorienting pastiche of recognizable live instruments and pure electronic and sound manipulation. While it makes for some interesting textures, unfortunately the overall dynamics of the tracks are lacking.
The first track (all are untitled) establishes the mood for the remainder: all minor chords; bizarre rattles; and slow, sinister droning strings. It is the audio equivalent of hovering in a thick mist where nothing is visible in any direction, yet there is obviously something there. The organic strings are a recurring motif throughout, appearing as an obvious cello in some tracks, or simply a slow, dense wave of tension later on.
Found sounds play a role as well: dripping water, indecipherable fragments of human voice, and the hum of a guitar amplifier run through distortion to no longer be ignorable, but prominent, and matched with an orchestral ambience in the longest, fourth track on the album. There is a definite density and thickness that can be heard in the mix of all tracks, layer upon layer of organic and synthetic instrumentation that beg for focused listening, which is where the problem arises.
There is nothing patently wrong with the album, not at all. In fact, the tracks reflect the album's overarching concept of landscapes. Like the terrain, they sit there, vast, but unchanging. From piece to piece they differ, but they don't have much individual direction: they're too complex to hinge on pure minimalism, yet structurally too repetitive to build much in the way of tension. Because of that, listening closely causes the tracks to start to slip into the background, which is unfortunate because there is a lot of interesting stuff going on here, the tracks just need more development and inertia to make them more engaging. As it stands now, the pieces just blend into the terrain they are intended to mimic, instead of standing out in uniqueness.
Most interesting is the fact that the shortest track on the disc—the third one that clocks in at about three and a half minutes—shows the most variation and development, with intertwining guitar and vibraphone sounds over drone and steady electronic pulse. Compared to the rest, it is very dynamic and the most fascinating here.
In small doses, as in by a track at at time, this is a great disc. However, it too easily becomes background sound and makes close, intensive listening difficult. Rather than relying on the tension built up at the immediate start of the tracks, Stimulus would do well to integrate more dynamic variation and structure into the individual works, because keeping the listener's attention that way could shift the album from simply being "interesting" to being far more "compelling."
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