Various – Pop Ambient 2010 (Kompakt)
4/5
By: Tim Dellow
This series, a comedown partner to the ever excellent Total compilations, has been curated by label co-founder Wolfgang Voigt (aka GAS) for ten years now. This anniversary edition brings together familiar names, highlighting its past but also pushing in new directions.
It opens with Marsen Jules’ ‘The Sound Of One Lip Kissing’, a dramatic industrial clipped beat that immediately subverts expectations by forcing the chill out. Each tenured pucker reverberates around the room puncturing your being with a mournful intangible sadness which only really exists in this form. The sense of drama is sublime and is the type of track that you could sit with on repeat for hours at a time.
Once you get over it though, the acoustic daubing of Brock Van Way/Bvdub’s first contribution to this edition ‘Lest You Forget’ is perhaps more predictable, yet lays out a palette of choral vocals that perfectly sets you up for his closing track on the compilation ‘Will You Know Where to Find Me’ a stunning self reflexive epic worthy of (especially if combined with the other track) its own release and worth buying for alone; a celebratory and delightfully complex way to lose yourself in sound.
Back to the running order and Triola samples a busy shopping area overdubbed with his blissed-out flute-loops, the music of a sole entity lost with headphones on as all rush about around them, and perhaps a somewhat literal suggestion of how best to enjoy it.
Wolfgang Voigt himself makes a rare appearance and will surely excite the hardcore beat-heads. A consistent hairdryer drone shrieks in the distant whilst light Pajo-esque guitar and accordion tones flitter across your eyes showering with light refracting droplets.
Andrew Thomas brings a tape decay and bass thrumb that reveal his influences, especially sandwiched between Voigt and The Orb; the most recognisable and commercial name on this records, and early patrons to the series. Their busier sound with a noticeable and (comparatively) together bass groove and 60s film vocal sample is a predictable hark back which never really takes off.
The dub-plate theme is continued with a toned down track from Mikkel Metal who’s chirping guitar drops remind of the influence of this scene in modern math-rock, but lead the way forward with a hypnotic piano line and nearly spoken aural clicks.
DJ Koze the opener and standout track of the recent Total 10 repeats the trick of best in show here with a song so entirely different but obviously the work of this new auteur. On the Total comp he provided ‘40 Love’, a track whose propulsive beat was sampled from a Tennis match and explored all of the possibilities of rhythmic potentials in that sound. Here on the bewitching ‘Bodenweich’ he proves he has the skill to perform this exercise with melody. A heavy bass gives into a piano and ghost cry manipulated melody which is one of the greatest moments of beauty ever associated to the label. Essential.
The link to Total 10 is re-iterated with the contribution of label co-owner Jürgen Paape whose ‘846M’ is a ambient take on his own ‘Ofterschwang’ which graced that earlier release, taking an oompah- heavy two step, at times crassly irritating, TUNE and twisting it on its head entirely to leave the sound of a lone brass player lost from the pack whose throat has been slit; spraying blood across the landscape while his windpipes are teased into sound by the wind. This form of hare kare on one’s own song shows not only a welcome humility, but also demonstrates that with the right frame of mind, a poetic beauty can be wrung from any atrocity.
Dettinger the label’s first full length artist contributes ‘Therefore’ whose simplistic looping must have once set a president and lead to the sense of a label sound but after the sheet beauty of Jürgen Paape feels tiresome and repetitive.
Thomas Fehlmann restores the peace with perhaps the most Ambient (in the Eno sense of the word) song on the album In the Wind which minimal drops, rumbles and reversed cymbals lead you to Popnoname’s ‘Deutz Air’ a sentimental feeling of a song that mixes a familiar flourish of sound with swathes of drone before passing out in bliss to the aforementioned ‘Will You Know Where to Find Me’ by Brok Van Wey/Bvdub which is only worth mentioning one more time as is utterly, utterly essential.
If the critical nonchalance usually afforded to these compilations is largely based on their consistency and regularity continues for another ten years, it would be a shame; for there are worse sins for a label than being consistently brilliant.
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