What I love about this album is it’s value of simplicity over complexity. All the songs are less than two minutes, and that urgency to create an abundance of colour and life into vignettes of experimental music is impressive. Such an odd collection of jazz, folk, electronic and rock influences make this album destined for cult obscurity.
Here’s a bizarre, surreal spew of experimental music that quite frankly has to be heard to be believed. There are decorations and inflections of dissonant, backwards-looped synthesizers meandering through a mish-mash of sci-fi peculiarities. It’s impenetrable and otherworldly.
It’s rare to find music so devoid of melody or tune but sound so inviting. You wander through a maze of electroacoustic sounds of familiar daily life, yet they feel utterly original and compelling to the ear. Occasionally the odd melody surfaces to the mix, but it’s the percussion and sound effects that are the real heros of this remarkably unusual album.
This scrunchy, splishy, sploshy, slippery, sludgy electronic-experimental concoction has more than an element of cohesion. It’s a voyage into the unknown lo-fi electronic universe, where wonky planets and percussive stars collide head-on against each other every second with gravel – an eccentric mix with random samples included.
Be prepared for this. It’s the sound of a skip-load of industrial machinery from a great height falling rapidly on your head. It’s as tough as old boots, hard uncompromising music that nearly reaches points of musicality. I appreciate the rhythmic layout of this ‘music’.
Imagine this – it’s a cold winter’s night and you’re walking through the city. You walk past club after club and bar after bar. You can hear haunting electronics, then a bit of smooth jazz, and then you hear the surreal experimentation you can’t fathom. This complex cauldron is the sound of Ambery.
The quality of this music varies as much as the instrumentation between each track. With a somewhat surreal combination of cello, fiddle, keyboard, electronics, samples and a hamster cage (apparently) this is certainly not mainstream. The splatter of sonic mayhem is quite unsettling.
There are unique qualities in certain music, as this album testifies. It’s post-metal (I’m not into metal) but the rhythms are jagged, irregular and intricate. You can hear the twisted experimentation in abundance, with sound after sound layering a fascinating and dense progressive rock landscape.
A crazy amalgamation of gamelan squeals and electronic peculiarities. This is most unusual, usually reserved for the outsider music territory. However, there is some rhythm sense and co-ordination, together with appropriate synthesizer glittering amidst the melee of gamelan madness.
When I listen to this I think of tatty, infected folk samples having an extra-marital affair with some no-good-for-nothing beats. At times moderately and averagely interesting, and at other times moderately rubbish and crap. This trip-hop record has it’s own unique partner in crime, but falls short on quality.
