Ian Fleming | Snowblind
Curated Doom (DL)
Munich-based Irish composer Ian Fleming‘s debut EP Snowblind has just been launched by Curated Doom with five exquisite ambient pieces, running just under a half hour. Opening with A desolate pinprick in a world of white, the listener is immediately drawn into a world of drone, crackle and wave-lapping bewilderment. The minimal work combines layers of field recordings and surface noise. The Calm, with its arresting tonal range as depicted in its accompanying video (below) is as it says, a muted, grounding drone that meanders slightly, creating an atmosphere of haunted beauty in its wake.
Within the easy seduction of Fleming’s initial sonic effort is Beneath the Avalanche, which is a bit more industrial, disconnected, like a facsimile of a memory rather than the real thing. Playing only from a distance, you may feel as though you are listening to a concert over a hill and a valley via a tunnel. It’s a strange perspective, but somehow comes off like a lull in a slightly deranged rock opus caught in-progress. Crevasse soars with a tingling sense of separation, of inertia-fueled gravity. There’s an edgeless-ness and resistance to the track as its form just floats in space, unchanged until the end where, like a granular waterfall, it spills away.
The concluding piece, Kholat Syakhl, howls like swirling wind in a heady mix that smoothly balances the synergy between nature and electronics. Without a soul in sight one might mistake this for a surveillance-like vehicular contraption, moving and monitoring for signs of life through a sandstorm. It’s granular and pixelated, while creating an atmosphere of whitenoise that is somehow oddly meditative.
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