Verdant Ambient Album

Bedroom musicians honing ambient textile music on their sticker-emblazoned laptops often listen back to the masterpieces of Brian Eno and wonder how, exactly, especially during those distant pre-PowerBook times, he achieved the levels of aural thoroughness and opacity, clarity and haze, texture and gloss that are the hallmarks of his work. They comfort themselves with the thought that perhaps the alchemical secret is just a matter of the surface noise from the tape on which it was all archaically recorded. Those same musicians won’t find much comfort in a new album by one of their contemporaries, Lomov, aka Axel Bergk. Holzwege, just out on the Autoplate netlabel, as of January 18, 2005, produces a realm of sound as dense as the philosophical Heidegger fable from which it reportedly takes its name. The full recording, eight tracks total, over one hour from end to end, has the sway and pulse of beat-oriented music, but those beats are steady and dispersed enough to be rendered close to invisible, mere ripples in the fabric, itself a lush pile built of tattered layers. Lomov virtually slows the metronome to the point that the music becomes an unmapped, verdant space unto itself, broken on rare occasion by splints of illumination. Really stunning stuff. Download the album from its autoplate.org page, complete with cover art. More on Lomov at lomov.gmxhome.de, and take time to check out the lovely, tree-lined video linked to from his site’s “snd” page.