Quest
Tuesday Evening (DL)
For Frans de Waard, this is as ambient as it gets, and it’s fairly pure in terms of genre. Quest is one of his projects born in the mid 90s to explore this form of transformative deep listening. The wavy synth and happy bird chirping illuminates a path, not unlike the forested coverart. Here he’s working in conjunction with an app by Canadian makers dreamSTATE. He’s also employing field recordings made in Austria along with other various tape loops. The hour-long improvisation balances rumbling motors, Blade Runner-style drifting sax, and idle drones that are as cautionary as they are lulling.
The artist’s early Beequeen works are hinted at as this morphs from what starts off quite glassy and dreamlike, to something far more intricate with the additional (and reduction of) braided layers. The mix is quite impeccable for what would be virtually a live take improv. The harmony swells with plumes and haunted charm. The composition is dappled with a rising, growing bass low, constantly regenerating. With crickets embedded over what sound like muted distant cousins to strings and percussion, the atmosphere is packed to the gills with an imploding intimacy. About half way through the volume dips down and most layers have been worked away, left with a stretched solitary synth, that too, starts to take on a new shape.
And it’s at this crux that the record starts to become delicately elusive, taking on this symphony of a vast nature. If you’ve ever stood alongside (or underneath) a mighty waterfall you start to grasp the picture being painted here. It’s impressionistic and informed by its surroundings, rather than trying to compete. Towards the end, with organ, various momentary tones and hollowed effects, becomes a hypnotic score of sorts.
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