Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Hiatus

With the recent posting of my review of Beautiful Ghost Wave, this blog will be on hiatus for an undetermined while due to other commitments. By the same token, I will no longer be able to accept promotional releases for review at Classical-Drone. I hope to continue writing for furthernoise.org, which recently posted my review of Netherworld's Glacial Movements release, Over The Summit.

Without proper review, let me signal a couple of online releases that have caught my ear. Dave Seidel sent me a link for his releases as mysterybear, all concerned with acoustical phenomena and microtonality. I already had his release Elementals in regular rotation, and I can also recommend Complex Silence 12, both sets of shimmering binaural microtonal drones.

Similarly, David Mekler wrote me about his folding drones, designed for deep meditation and introspection, released as the three-part Realignment Series. Your meditational mileage may vary — typical new age melodic massage music is more like Bambi to the folding drones Godzilla. I've only heard the first set so far, which gaze into the void and greet the ineffable with an amorphous roar.

I had also meant to comment on the passing of Lucette Bourdin, a composer of serene late night ambient music. Many of her works are freely available at her site and on various other netlabels. Some of her Earth Mantra releases, including Timeless Shore and Silver Moon, are in our regular somnolent rotation.

The list is too short for all the sounds worth pursuing, but that's all for this moment. I expect to resume later this summer.

UPDATE (November 2, 2011): Closed for somewhat longer duration. I have amicably parted ways with furthernoise.org, so at this time there is no new music writing. I'm closing comments at this point as well. Many thanks for all the great music.