THING

With this eleventh edition, attenuation circuit continues its series of four-way split albums called THING. The aim is to provide a medium for exchange and presentation of a great variety of artists. As each artist spreads the copies to their network, listeners also get to know the other artists featured on the same disc. The title references the fact that the CDs are physical objects – things! – but also refers to the 'thing' or 'ding' in old Norse and other Germanic languages, which designates the place of a popular assembly or the assembly itself and thus alludes to the 'meeting-place' character of the albums on (or around) which the four artists and their audiences meet, if only virtually.

This THING could be labelled a ‚dark ambient‘ album, but only in so far as it tries to stretch the limits of such categorisation as far as possible. NYM’s untitled track combines laminar ambient sounds with field recordings, seemingly of natural origin, and runs a sort of psychoacoustic test in which listeners have to decide whether they’re inside or outside the soundscape. Vojenská Nemocnice’s „Hate You Hate You“ also employs found footage, this time of human voices, and the title combined with the fact that the project name references a hospital in Brno, place the „cinema for the ears“ invoked in listeners’ heads firmly in the horror genre. Guiguisuisui feat. Anzhi depart from classic ambient structures in favour of a kind of artificial ritual music, as if „The Light of the Hanged Man’s Hand“ were a setting to music of a grueling folktale from the Himalayas, on whose folklore the London/China-based project draws in their work. „Something Follows“ by Andreas Rönnquist is a great choice for an opening track, not only because of the meta-pun (unless an album only has one track, ‚something follows‘ every opening track, namely, the second track :-)), but rather because the more abstract, mononchrome sound of his drone composition puts the listeners’ mind into a contemplative mood that supports the reception of the following tracks.

File under: dark ambient