Paolo Mascolini, who is based in Italy, records ambient electronic music as Sōzu Project. There is a new Sōzu album, Garden, due out this coming month, on April 4. In advance of the release, Mascolini posted a teaser track on his SoundCloud account. At six minutes in length, it contains samples of 10 different sources, presumably the 10 tracks of the full forthcoming album.
While “garden_teaser,” as it is titled, is clearly a sample menu of the full release, it is recommended as listening unto itself. Ambient music, especially in its nature-mimicking mode, free of overt beats and given to artful longueur, is something to get lost in, something that through sheer absence of evident footholds like melody and rhythm evades the full grip of attention and memory. Here, however, each track’s peaceful spaciousness is presented as a short snippet. In turn, the ear can not only focus on the individual elements, but compare the ambience in quick succession, each track represented by a roughly 33-second extract.
There is, at the opening, the sort of bird-dense field recording that the album’s title suggests. Later come a variety of materials that might feel overall samey or of a type in full length, but here are are firmly distinct. There are drones with lighter birdsong and glitchy chimes, sea-sawing white noise, backward masked guitar with insectoid vibrations, and other sonic treats, some darker than others as the tracks progress.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/sozu_proj. More from Sōzu Project at sozu-project.com and twitter.com/SOZUproject.