Bryan Hilyard’s “Asleep in Amber” is a gentle drone. To say it’s a drone is to say it subsists on waveforms. To say it subsists on waveforms is to say that it pulses. The pace at which it pulses provides an internal contrast to the sounds themselves, which are gentle, hazy, soft, true to the slumber made explicit by the track’s title. The pace of the pulse, in contrast, is fairly quick, the main waveform moving more like water pushing at a pier as the tides shift than like a ripple on an otherwise still pond. It’s insistent for much of the track’s first third, at which point it dives. The pulse remains, but it’s deep, shadowed by the dense shimmer that Hilyard takes artful pains to accumulate. There seem to be voices in the mix, though they’re never remotely intelligible. They’re trapped even deeper down than is the pulse — like the title says, “Asleep in Amber.”
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/hilyard. More from Hilyard, who is based in Mariaville, Maine, at hilyard.bandcamp.com and twitter.com/hilyardmusic. (Track found via a repost by soundcloud.com/themonkbythesea, aka Ivan Ujevic of Zagreb.)