VARIOUS ARTISTS - rufs

(CD, fenetre)

The true beauties of this fine little compilation from Fenetre Records are hidden somewhere in the middle. From the lonely guitar-reverb-sounds of a lap steel made into a melody of The Jedson Project’s “Lela” to the middle era Pink Floyd (the short but productive years before the dark side of the moon) like harmonies of Nick Grey’s “black paper mountain” or from the subtle, atmospheric meanderings of Rigil’s “questions in letters” to the longwinding, dense drones of Svarte greiner, the middle part of this compilation is the place were you fall in love with this compilation. Or not. But you might better.

The first few tracks seem like mostly simple, sometimes surprising, but never too expressive, home recorded glitch-pop (for lack of a better word). The place in life where young men (and girls, but mostly men, though) record melancholic instrumentals into their laptops and then rework them with whatever tools are handy on their computers. Which is of course not true for Melodium, because they are too experienced to fit this description, but their track doesn’t really convince me this time around. Maybe it is too clouded by what is around it. Towards the end, the music starts to drag a little too much. Like a long night out when the hours seem to stay fixed and without change but you are still waiting for the night to be over to be able to go home finally. It gets harder to say when one track has ended and the next one begins. The middle part is what made me relisten to the record over and over again, while the beginning and end made me go on listening.

Atmosphere is the basic word herein. All songs wallow in atmosphere, in drawing the surroundings into the sounds and give meaning to the word ambient as in filling the space around the listener with meaning. Sometimes patches of sound bubble like little noises, then some real noises accentuate the move from one track to the next. Which, by the way, is the complete opposite meaning of what the term’s inventor, Brian Eno, postulated in the liner notes for his legendary “Ambient 1: Music for airports”, but who cares. The sounds are brooding and uplifting, glitches turn into drones and pop into sound. The end is a nice little track hobbling and swirling around some interesting piano licks.

Probably this dynamic structure of the songs within the compilation is on purpose, but not only to give the whole record a meta-level of meaning, but also to agree certain parts towards certain parts of the audience. I read that this compilation was first released as a mp3-only, then evolved into a CD-R and now comes as a real CD. I am not sure what that means in regards to the quality of the music – a lot of great music has withered away on ephemeral media such as DAT’s, minidisks and old fashioned tapes, the most important factor about the medium is to get the music out to the people I think – but it sounds like a success story to my ears.