First Review

BOOMKAT

Second Review

BLEEP

Three Review

Fifth Review

Sixth Review

When can a category of music be said to have a history? When does it grow beyond the churning out of new sub-genre after new sub-genre, and attain a degree of self-reflexivity, to the point where it can look back on its own past? To ask such questions is like asking when a body of water becomes deep enough to be called an ocean. But there comes a stage when a form of music, if it is to continue to be culturally significant, learns how to reflect on its own development, and distinguish what was of lasting value from what was merely a frantic scramble after the next new fad. A turning point is reached when this process becomes incorporated into the music itself, rather than being limited to the discussions surrounding it.

“I Remember (Translations of Mørketid)”, the recent release by bvdub for Glacial Movements, is an example of electronic music becoming self-reflexive. The album is a “translation” of Netherworld’s 2007 album “Mørketid”, using this material as a base for the construction of new musical narratives. In the press release bvdub writes:

“The original album brought back all my memories of my time in the early rave scene, the dreams I (and everyone, really) had for the beautiful utopia that only existed in our minds, and which we were only able to reach but a few times – but also my current surroundings of China, where in a rapidly changing environment, I am constantly reminded of unrealized dreams.”

Few cultural movements of the last twenty years have been subject to as many reams of dewy-eyed nostalgia as the early rave scene. But that is not what is happening with “I Remember”. The album recollects and recalls the sounds and energies of rave, but does so in order to interrogate them, to put them to the test, to squeeze them like a lemon to see what can be extracted that still has meaning and value for today ? and does so at the level of the music, not just the talk surrounding it. The release was composed in Shaoxing, China, in 2010 ? a far cry from the muddy fields of Home Counties England. Yet, there are elements of the ethos and dynamics of rave that continue to resonate for bvdub, even in such a different time and place. If nothing else, the sometimes pounding rhythms and piercing synths, when run through the filter of thick ambient textures and haunting drones, is proof of the remaining capacity for dream ? one could say it is dreaming. Dreaming of the past, to some extent, of hopes unrealised, but also of the future, of what could be. This is music that respects its own past while instilling it with new meanings and new potential.

After all, the name ‘ocean’ means more than just a deep body of water…

- Nathan Thomas for Fluid Radio

FLUID RADIO
 

Seventh Review

It can be difficult establishing a sense of personality in ambient music. Because of a relative formlessness and a lack of narrative-building lyrics, many of the ways artists assert themselves are via extra-musical details like album art, liner notes, or artist bios on the far wonky side of the spectrum. Think, for instance, of Brian Eno's genre-defining essays to the nature-worshipping or the botanically-themed titles of Biosphere. Brock Van Wey, aka bvdub, offers another good example. Van Wey is a hyper-prolific ambient producer-- six full-length releases this year alone, counting one collaboration with Ian Hagwood-- whose deeply sentimental titles ("This Place Had Known Only Sadnes", "There Was Nothing But Beauty in My Heart") and cover art of cold, lonely landscapes lit from within by a heavenly glow, place him in a corner one might term "emo-ambient."

It's a minor niche, maybe, but bvdub is hardly alone. Ghostly International artist the Sight Below has leveraged similarly sad-sack song titles-- "Feeling Lost Forever", "Burn Me Out From the Inside"-- to evoke goth's mope and shoegaze's introversion. (The Sight Below's also gone so far as to record an actual Joy Division cover, making the leap from mere signposting to straight-up homage). A certain type of music fan might be disposed to see these weepy marble-notebook poetry headings as kind of a flipside to the playful and potty-mouthed wordiness that helped distinguished the Locust and Kid 606 as abrasive sonic pranksters rather than faceless avant noisemakers.

The songs on bvdub's newest, I Remember, tend to follow a standard ambient formula, one made most familiar to indie audiences via Wolfgang Voigt's masterful Gas albums for Kompakt, on whose Pop Ambient series Van Wey has also appeared: a wash of sound builds-- layers of white noise, echo, and submerged melodies-- gradually reaching a climax sustained and minutely varied for minutes on end. Out of these slowly shifting clouds, any number of distinct elements (massed choral voices, the metallic pluck of an individual guitar string, echoing finger snaps) might emerge before being swirled back into the fog. Which is not to say the songs are mere static-- a single track (all but one of which on the 78-minute album clocks in at 13 minutes or more) might subtly evolve through multiple movements before you realize they've passed. There are also slight but noticeable deviations from the ambient template: "Would It Be the Same" begins as a piano played in a bottomless well of reverb but gives way to the album's lone beat-driven passage, full of prickly, brittle-sounding hi-hat skitter.

Personality is a different concern from mood, of course, and I Remember would be thick with mood even without the handy reference points of track names and album covers. From the slowly coalescing guitar figure that opens the record to the Arctic-wind howl that fades it out, bvdubs' tracks effectively conjure feelings of, alternately, frigid isolation and quietly blissful/wistful reverie.

PITCHFORK
 

Eight Review

Slow and oozing, Bvdub captures a sound that could be what a glacier sounds like to Mother Earth. But is it a stand-alone musical genre, like dubstep or synthpop? The Internet offers little aid to this navel-searching question, but in this "translation" of Alessandro Tedeschi's Mørketid, Bvdub achieves the chilled-out calm of its previous project, The Art of Dying Alone.

Opening the collection is "This Place Has Known Nothing But Sadness." It is a melancholy composition, looped voices call back and forth, a beat pulses as slowly as the lunar tides, and a gentle hiss recalls the sound of icy rain on a smooth sea. There's nary a silence as we slide into "We Said Forever" -- the icy rain has moved north and a second loop repeats a chord progression slowly behind an iceberg. It is as if a polar bear is learning guitar from a book he recovered from a frozen Arctic explorer. These are long, long cuts; it takes us half an hour to get this far. The premise of long, slow musical narration carries and cuts to "Would It Be the Same," which somehow mixes a guitar string with a piano to create a short melody that stands behind a layer of synth melodies -- some slowly drifting, some strolling at a moderate pace, and all subservient to sampled and re-sampled human voices. These people had a soul once a long time ago, but now they are divided between so many tracks they've lost their humanity and become granular ice pellets.

Global warming be damned, this record evokes cold better than The Resident's Eskimo.

Bvdub is principally Brock Van Wey, a Dutchman who has set up shop in China. It's the happening place, and I'd love to know what the Chinese think of this chilled-out ambience.

INK19

Nineth Review

CRONIQUE ELECTRONIQUE

Tenth Review

ONDAROCK

Eleven Review

MONSIEUR DELIRE

Twelve Review

ALONE MUSIC

Thirteen Review

La collaborazione tra Alessandro Tedeschi, padre della Glacial Movements, e Brock Van Wey, mente di Bvdub, dà nuovi ed inaspettati frutti dopo l'ottimo CD "The Art Of Dying Alone", concepito circa un anno e mezzo fa dalla prolifica mente dell'artista americano. Stavolta Bvdub traduce e rivede "Mørketid", ottimo disco firmato da Netherworld (progetto personale dello stesso Tedeschi) nel 2007. Sembra infatti che Van Wey sia rimasto talmente affascinato da questo lavoro da volerne ripercorrere i passi, dotandolo di una nuova anima. Nella sua rivisitazione permangono alcuni punti fermi: il fascino per i panorami naturali, che dalle lande artiche si spostano in zone più vive e colorate, e quei drones lineari che riescono a mimare lo scorrere di elementi come il vento o l'acqua. Quanto c'era di oscuro nell'originale tende ora ad inebriarsi di luce, passando da situazioni crepuscolari al candore dell'aurora. La sovrapposizione all'unisono di tonalità dense e luminose è infatti il leit-motiv stilistico del disco, che viene poi completato con l'aggiunta di rumori ritmici, voci soffiate dalla brezza ed echi dispersi all'orizzonte. In due sole occasioni ci si allontana in maniera ispirata da questo modello compositivo, ed esattamente in "Would It Be The Same", dove al drone viene prima sotteso un insistente giro di chitarra acustica e poi una base dub (che rimanda Brock allo stile che gli ha dato notorietà), e nella conclusiva "A Taste Of You Own Medicine", in cui i drones spezzati assumono al contempo la potenza di un tornado e le fattezze di un macchinario industriale, dando uno duro scossone alla calma dei brani precedenti. "I Remember" è un lavoro raffinato che riesce da un lato a fondere due idee musicali diverse, e dall'altro a mantenere vivi gli spunti originari rivivendoli in modo diverso. Gli amanti dell'ambient naturalistica e i fedelissimi della Glacial Movements saranno entusiasti. Michele Viali

DARKROOM MAGAZINE

Fourteen Review

bvdub: I Remember (translations of ‘Mørketid')
Glacial Movements

Brock Van Wey's contribution to Alessandro Tedeschi's Glacial Movements imprint is interesting on many levels, starting with the background details for the recording. For I Remember—though its wistful title is very much in keeping with other bvdub titles—isn't an original collection in the strict sense but rather Van Wey's sonic response to an invitation Tedeschi extended to him in 2010, namely to create a “translation” of the Mørketid album that was issued in 2007 under his Netherworld alias. Van Wey emphasizes that the resultant collection is, properly speaking, a translation as opposed to remixes, and in this regard he's entirely accurate. The result is suffused to the fullest degree with the spirit and stylistic personality of bvdub, that is, an epic form of slow-motion ambient that's permeated by longing. In this instance, Tedeschi's music has acted as a catalyst that has enabled an incredible collection of bvdub music to come into being, the irony being that this collaborative process has allowed bvdub music of the utmost purity to be born.

That the material was written and produced by bvdub in Shaoxing, China is more than a production detail. Van Wey himself describes how his adopted home constantly reminds him of the unrealized dreams of its people and the need we all have to be heard and feel connected to others. Even so, a single listen shows that I Remember, no matter its reflective character, is anything but wallflower music. The epic pitch that “This Place Has Only Known Sadness,” for example, reaches during its last quarter verges on deafening, and a similarly grandiose attack informs some of the other material, too. In fact, the towering masses of “The Promise (reprise)” work themselves into such a wall-of-sound lather, it might be more accurate to characterize the piece as beatless shoegaze rather than ambient. All of the tracks but one (the aggressive, synth-heavy closer “A Taste of Your Own Medicine”) are longer than thirteen minutes, and consequently most settings build slowly, their reverberant layers of vaporous washes and muffled melodic figures accumulating incrementally until climaxes are reached. Sometimes a single instrument (such as piano during “Would it Be the Same” and acoustic guitar during “There Was Nothing but Beauty in My Heart”) acts as the nucleus around which the other elements constellate, and in some cases a beat pattern pushes its way to the forefront, as happens during “We Said Forever.”

A few associations emerge as one listens to the recording. The opening three minutes of “Would It Be The Same” have a gauzy quality that suggests bvdub has more in common with Popol Vuh than any of his ambient contemporaries (though that connection collapses the moment beat patterns, first a skittish, Murcof-like beat and then a slower funk pulse, unexpectedly appear). And while I appreciate that it might sound overblown to draw an association between bvdub's music and the Sirens of Homer's The Odyssey, the association nevertheless declares itself in isolated moments, in particular during “There Was Nothing but Beauty in My Heart” when the caressing murmur of wordless female voices appears. Recall that Odysseus ordered his men to tie him to the ship's mast when they passed the Sirens' island, so that he'd still be able to hear their bewitching voices without being drawn to the island and having his ship smash against the rocks, as had been the fate of others before him. In its own way, Van Wey's music bewitches too. November 2011

TEXTURA

Fifteen Review

Bvdub è Brock Van Wey, americano trasferitosi in Cina, già apparso su Glacial Movements con The Art Of Dying Alone, uscito l’anno scorso.Qui Brock parte dai suoni di Mørketid, album di Netherworld (Alessandro Tedeschi, che di Glacial Movements è il fondatore). Mørketid è un disco ambient che cerca di riprodurre, anche grazie a field recordings, i paesaggi artici, I Remember può esserne definito una possibile rilettura: nessuno vuole scrivere “remix” perché qui certe volte comincia quasi un discorso a parte. Di sicuro Brock ha colto di più il lato “in pace” e poetico di Mørketid, meno quello buio. Nell’iniziale “This Place Has Only Known Sadness” espande un suono (una sensazione) all’infinito nel tempo e nel volume, un po’ come accade dopo in “We Said Forever”, che a metà strada s’arricchisce di un battito che l’avvicina al lavoro di The Sight Below di Rafael Anton Irisarri, cioè una specie di shoegaze elettronico, in bilico tra beatitudine e malinconia. Su questa strada si muove anche “Would It Be The Same”: a questo punto siamo già a un’ora di remix/traduzione e forse “There Was Nothing But Beauty In My Heart” è un po’ troppo autocompiaciuta per condurre senza stancare sino a una più concisa (e dinamica) “A Taste Of Your Own Medicine”. Se non si faceva prendere troppo la mano, Brock finiva in tutte le playlist di fine anno
 

AUDIODROME

Sixteen Review

ROCKAROLLA (November 2011)

Seventeen

Over the years Brock van Wey, better known as Bvdub, has refined his style of dreamy ambient into fluid and intricately layered sound collages, removing him more and more from his dub-techno beginnings and entering blissful Kompakt-style ”Ambient Pop“-spheres. And in the process, he finally got rid of all beats as well. On ”I Remember“ everything flows calmly in a warm ocean of sound sometimes punctuated by gently rippling piano-chords (okay okay, when he gets out his guitar it gets a little over the top). Every composition on here is about fifteen minutes long, taking you on a soothing journey and slowing you down. If you like your ambient lush and dreamy, Brock van Wey is your man.
 

ARTISTXITE

Eighteen Review

To niesamowite ile z, w gruncie rzeczy, ledwie rzetelnej płyty jaką jest „Morketid” wyciągnął Brock Van Wey, kryjący się za szyldem BVDUB. Okazuje się bowiem, iż ten opisywany dziś przeze mnie znakomity album składa się – jak sam tytuł wskazuje – z utworów inspirowanych wspomnianym wcześniej wydawnictwem Netherworld, jak również zbudowanych na bazie dźwięków z tejże. Nie wiem ile materiału wyjściowego procentowo Brock wyciągnął z „Morketid”, a ile to jego wkład własny. I szczerze mówiąc nawet nie chciało mi się tego sprawdzać, bo w tym przypadku nie ma to kompletnie znaczenia.

Muzyka zawarta na „I Remember” dosłownie kipi od uczuć. I to takich ludzkich, niekoniecznie powiązanych z siłami Natury, co, zważywszy na profil wytwórni, zakrawa na mały paradoks. To soundtrack dla utraconej miłości, niespełnionych obietnic, beznadziejnej pogoni za szczęściem, tęsknoty, godzenia się ze stratą. Nie tylko ujmujące w swej prostocie i może nawet lekkiej kiczowatości tytuły wskazują kierunek w jakim winny podążać emocje słuchacza. To przede wszystkim muzyka. Otwierający album „This Place Has Only Known Sadness” to kwintesencja tego, o czym wspomniałem powyżej i jednocześnie jeden z najbardziej wzruszających muzycznych fragmentów z jakimi miałem przyjemność obcować w ostatnich latach. Owszem, to wciąż ambient, pełen plam dźwiękowych nawarstwiających się z każdym kolejnym cyklem, zapętlonych sampli (w tym przypadku prosty gitarowy motyw i cudowna kobieca wokaliza), wolno płynących melodii. Ale to coś wyzierające z muzyki, oddziałujące nie tylko na zmysł słuchu, ale i na ducha… No nie wiem, trzeba chyba mieć serce z kamienia, żeby nie poruszyło gdzieś tam żadnej czułej struny.

Emocje emocjami, ale i pod względem techniczno – kompozytorskim to kawał znakomitej roboty. Wrażenie robi mnogość muzycznych pomysłów wykorzystanych przez artystę, bo obok tradycyjnego „lodowego” ambientu Van Wey rozrzuca na płycie dźwięki gitary, zarówno akustycznej, jak i elektrycznej, niemalże transowe, dubowe rytmy, raz przykryte grubą warstwą lodu, innym razem wyciągnięte na samą powierzchnię (gdzieś na horyzoncie miga mi szyld z napisem Fax), sample ludzkich głosów, pojawia się nawet flet, którego brzmienie kojarzy mi się z progrockowymi kapelami z lat 70-tych – tyle że nie wywija on żadnych melodii, użyty jest jedynie do wzbogacenia i zagęszczenia brzmienia. A to jest świetne, gęste, pełne i masywne. Nie wiem iloma ścieżkami bawił się muzyk, ale kiedy za -entym z kolei przesłuchaniem wciąż dosłuchuję się nowych smaczków, i to nawet niekoniecznie takich w stylu, że: „o, a tego pyknięcia wcześniej jakoś nie dostrzegłem”, ale całych kapitalnych motywów i melodii, tyle że wprasowanych gdzieś między piątą a szóstą warstwę dźwiękową tak, że całość stanowi masywny monolit… nie mogę tego nie docenić.

Cudowna, ujmująca płyta. Kolejny strzał w dziesiątkę Glacial Movements. Nie pierwszy i nie ostatni zapewne. Brawo. A jak ładnie się okładka z naszym bannerem komponuje…
 

SANTASAGRE MAGAZINE

Nineteen Review

Subtitled "Translation of Mørketid," Brock Van Wey's second album for the Glacial Movements label is a reinterpretation of an album by label head Alessandro Tedeschi. The music is exactly what you might expect from a label called Glacial Movements: ambient and more or less beatless, and tending to develop very, very slowly but with irresistible force. The album's opening track, "This Place Has Only Known Sadness," builds up a great density of layers over the course of 16 minutes; the layers include soft, hissy static, pseudo-choral vocals, organ chords, and eventually slow and deliberate percussion. "We Said Forever," on the other hand, is more richly musical, with a brief repetitive chord pattern that also gradually thickens and is surrounded by drones and wordless choirs; then suddenly the mood switches and becomes darker, more throbbing, with a beat that straddles house and dub. These two tracks pretty much set the pattern for the album: droning chords that shift like cloud banks; beats that vary from desultory to urgent ("Would It Be the Same"); glitches and dubwise touches that sometimes dance on the surface and sometimes mutter down below. Voices come in from time to time, but rarely say anything intelligible. The result is a listening experience by turns relaxing and unsettling, but always quite beautiful.

ALL MUSIC GUIDE

Twenty Review

ROCKERILLA (December 2011)

Twenty-one Review

Score: 7/10

Even though Brock Van Wey’s career as a composer only recently began, he’s already released a substantial catalogue of material. Van Wey’s roots can be traced to 1993, when he frequently performed as a DJ in San Francisco. His solo work as bvdub grazes various genres but mostly can be described as measures of stripped-down ambient textures shaded with minimal IDM. It’s not exactly the type of music that crowds will be dancing to, but then again the artist could certainly move bodies if it was requested. More importantly, bvdub’s ambient compositions are more highbrow than the standard sequence-pusher, and so his latest work requires a carefully inspected assessment. This isn’t music that facilitates dance, it’s music meant to be consciously absorbed on the drive home. His vision is derived from a blend of post-electronic anthems that often appear important but in a very imperceptible manner. Perhaps one could draw the allusion of his material appearing similar to the reverse side of a cross-stitch project, a cluttered permutation of intersections that are vital for the integrity of the façade.

A former TSB writer poignantly noted that Van Wey’s 2009 release failed to live up to the principles argued by Brian Eno on the liner notes from Music for Airports. This “Eno dictum” is simple: “Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular, it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Fortunately, I Remember (Translations of ‘Mørketid’), bvdub’s newest work, maintains a quality that fits closer to Eno’s standard.

The heart of I Remember is neither forgettable nor generic. Rather, the release is a six-track example of rather excellent ambient material. Its duration is fairly lengthy; the shortest song clocks in less than seven minutes while the longest reaches sixteen. But though the tracks don’t demand the scrutiny of their listener, they certainly possess plenty of substance and therefore shouldn’t be simply written off as background music. Instead, these pieces stand firmly despite the fact that their aggregate doesn’t even constitute an original release.

The inspiration for this album arrived when Italian artist Alessandro Tedeschi of Netherworld invited Van Wey to translate his group’s 2007 release, Mørketid. Van Wey used Tedeschi’s original work as a template and subsequently integrated his own sounds and samples. The final blend sounds intimately textured and significant; Tedeschi’s original pieces resound through Van Wey’s elegant segments. A theme exists throughout the release but eludes those simply listening vacuously; it isn’t obviously evident within the compositions. Of course, the song titles adequately reflect the motif, but aside from that the release doesn’t necessarily invoke the same sentiments in the listener that Van Wey may have felt while composing and reworking the source material. Some might consider this aspect one of I Remember’s shortcomings—and perhaps it is. Yet I’d say that it’s probably difficult to weave concrete subjects within ambient music; it’s a more prudent suggestion to consider this lack of cohesion as rather inconsequential. Besides, ultimately the themes don’t even appear to be meant for the listener anyway. Van Wey stated that his listen to Mørketid left him feeling reflective on his days listening to early trance music and the utopian sentiments it inspired. He created I Remember to reflect the idea that he was constantly being reminded of personal dreams both achieved and unrealized. The motif is personal to the artist, it represents a struggle that most men face in their lifetimes: ensuring that the world doesn’t forget them.

Ultimately, I Remember is worth a listen. It certainly isn’t bvdub’s strongest release of the year, but considering that it’s a re-imagined work based on an older release, the results certainly justify the appeal.

-Brent Andrew Dare
 

THE SILENT BALLET

Twenty-two Review

As far as it is possible to make distinctions within the genre, ambient can typically be divided into several stylistic groups. There are the Chthonic rumblings; the abstract, mechanical droning and the glacial engulfing, a prime example of which is the artist Netherworld which provides a hyperborean tapestry of hoarfrost and borealis. The release “I Remember” by Bvdub is, in his words, a “translation” of the album “Morketid” by the aforementioned Netherworld which transfigures the sound into another category of ambient, one that is aery and buoyant, a celebration of tetherless atmosphere frolic; a cascade of vaporous mists, fuming clouds and vibrant solar blooms. Like a cool breeze the sound refreshes as opposed to oppressing, crystallizing thought rather than hemming it through strict over-vigorous plateaus of sound. Unfamiliar with the original album that forms the foundations of “I Remember”, I have found Netherworld’s other work quite solemn and melancholy. “I Remember” starts off with this taint of sadness inherited from its predecessor but progresses contemplatively into an almost jubilatory mood. Bvdub has taken an ode to nature, what I assume to be the characteristic Netherworld album of album of awe, horror and reawakening in the face of the natural world and has made it more human, more internalized and replete with emotions that are simpler, less romantic yet somehow closer to home. The notion of memory is to be found in the title and in the artist’s own statement, the album itself seems like a retrospective via proxy, akin to the tepid mire of memory from which we draw our consolations and inspirations.

Yet the atmosphere is so far only the canvas, the backdrop upon which the author decides to weave in the more straightforward elements. With this, the release takes a step away from purely soundscape ambient and one into the realm of more structured electronica. A semblance of beat, repetition and vocalization emerges, pushing the glacial auditory horizon even further into the background. Like Skadi or Desiderii Marginis, an adherence to utter freeform and slow mellifluous elaboration of texture is dropped in favour of loops, beats and stifled melodies which introduce a peculiar kind of melodious minimalism. At times the electronic beats which are added over the sound come off as too forced and unnecessary. I would have preferred if they were less prominent, as they introduce a slightly jarring funk element to an album of otherwise greater depth. On the other hand, it does play into the mosaic of memory which the author strives to capture, given that he has acknowledged his own penchant for trance music. To the uninitiated, it may seem like an alien intrusion and a break in the flow of the track.

The interesting highlights which evoked a particularly strong aesthetic reaction were the moments in the standout track “There was nothing but beauty in my heart” which features minimal guitar and ethereal female voice. The tone and texture of the album shifts pleasingly from track to track without coming across as too disjointed. The tracks are also of satisfying length, a oft overlooked facet of ambient, not overstaying their welcome and not cutting off prematurely. Overall the album is to be recommended if one appreciates an element of flair and finesse in ambient. The tracks, or “translations” are carefully constructed rather than whimsical and leave a pronounced impression of the flight of thought, the expansive vistas of memory and the immense currents of the mind. It is mood lightening music for contemplation made with depth and subtlety. Simultaneously lucidity and veil, it is a catalyst for nostalgia and a stirring of thoughts.

HEATHEN HARVEST

Twenty-three Review

Alessandro Tedeschi’s Glacial Movements label presents yet more frosty ambience, this time from the ultra-prolific Brock Van Wey, aka bvdub. The story goes that Van Wey was so enamoured by Tedeschi’s own Netherworld project (and the album Mørketid in particular) that he took up the offer of making his own record of ‘translations’, on which he takes the original tracks as a starting point and creates his own lengthy pieces based around the memories Mørketid stirred up in him the first time he heard it.
Musically we’re in almost beat-less ambient drift territory. It’s telling that bvdub has appeared on Kompakt’s Pop Ambient compilations in the past, because Wolfgang Voigt’s legendary Gas project is a definite precedent here. The tracks mutate and develop slowly and subtly from icily minimal beginnings to layered, thick washes of haze at their ends. All tracks but one clock in at 13+ minutes, so their length allows them to progress almost imperceptibly, with Van Wey adding minuscule details here and there – unearthly voices, soft guitar strokes, manipulated string tones – until you’re left with swirling snowstorms without actually knowing much about how you got there. ‘Would It Be The Same’ shifts the mood slightly, adding a skittering beat to proceedings and serving as a kind of sonic pick-me-up before we’re plunged back into the ambient meanderings of ‘There Was Nothing But Beauty In My Heart’ and the final, shorter ‘A Taste Of Your Own Medicine’, which not only has the most titillating title on the record but also packs a suitably howling, windswept punch with which to close the album.

Just one more thing…

The song titles are of the kind I’m never sure whether to take seriously. ‘This Place Has Only Known Sadness’, ‘There Was Nothing But Beauty In My Heart’ – James Leyland Kirby does it as well, but with him I kind of take it as being comically overwrought as opposed to unbearably earnest. Somehow I think Van Wey falls into the latter category. It’s certainly true there’s not even the slightest sliver of humour visible through these dense frozen tone fogs – there’s no reason for there to be – but I find it all a little bit po-faced when combined with the supporting spiel about ‘the beauty of knowing that dreams exist,’ and ‘beautiful utopia in our minds’. Kirby’s not a bad comparison, actually – I Remember shares similar themes with Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was albeit based out of some frosty region of the North as opposed to a haunted ballroom.

Having said all that, I Remember is one of the strongest releases I’ve heard yet on Glacial Movements, a record label which is becoming increasingly fascinating for its single-minded exploration of all things cold and isolated. This is something I’m shortly going to explore with Tedeschi himself, so keep an eye on the site for that

FOXY DIGITALIS

Twenty-four Review

GO MAGAZINE nr. 127

Twenty-five Review

AUTRES DIRECTION

Twenty-six Review

Twenty-seven Review

IGLOO MAGAZINE

Twenty-eight Review

HEADPHONE COMMUTE

Twenty-nine Review

MUSIC WAVES