There are spaces where industrial music and ambient meet. One such space exists where the drone of archaic, mechanized activity joins up with a concern less for the routinization of modern life, and more for the machinery itself. It’s less about, perhaps, the metronomic pulse of life, and instead more about the underlying hum of activity. Beats go by the wayside as an aesthetic affection for rust, for the texture of a grinding gear, for the serrated whir of equipment takes control. This is the industrial ambient of the first side of Session One, the album a pair of lengthy tracks (17 and nearly 13 minutes each) by Ariana van Gelder and Ars Troitski. Presumably Session One isn’t a split single — that, instead, the two musicians are acting in tandem, or at least trading files toward a singular, collaborative whole. The first side is a rich, slowly evolving soundfield, through which various airborne irritants make their conflicting paths, leading to a whorl of action in what might seems, on first listen, to be a portrait of stasis. The flip side (neither has a name, save “side a” and “side b”) is where a more familiar rendering of industrial rears its gearhead. After a slow build, it is all heavy klang, though even here the klang is still more about volume and power than about tempo. Gorgeous stuff.
Album originally posted at pomusic.bandcamp.com. P.O. is a record label based in Moscow, Russia. More from Ariana van Gelder at arianavangelder.com (I didn’t locate a link for Ars Troitski).