While modern culture enjoys the distractions of its electric sideshow, Slow Meadow opens a rare space for peace, thought and warmth. Multi-instrumentalist Matthew Kidd creates reassuring Ambient Chamber Music that flows with the solemn and blissful insistence of life itself and brings fragrance into the listener's solitude. Featuring mainly pianos and strings, as well as an imaginative assortment of samples, gentle distortion, and other detailed effects, Kidd's key-centered pieces each move, by root progressions, to a perfect resolution. He makes the relationships of triadic tonality as interesting and understandable as possible, and so the character and quality of his ideas become richer in the process. The musical gestures we encounter are straightforward and uncomplicated. By combining vague classical influences with weightless Ambient Music Slow Meadow conjures up a safe zone - a realm where notes always stay the same, but meaning is ever changing.
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Hotel Neon decorates our condition with sound. Michael Tasselmyer, Andrew Tasselmyer and Steven Kemner draw on a restless sonic imagination to realize music that seems less made than discovered. As if plucked from the ether and given color, voice and form their work offers the audience relief from the plight of Mankind. Thanks to the players' subtly heightened, fiercely focussed energies, their performances resound with emotional and intellectual acuity. Using primarily electric guitars and synthesizer pure harmonics spiral around us and texture seems to hang in the air. Routed through various levels and kinds of processing, the vibrating steel strings of their instruments blur into interference fringes, the result of unique sonic diffraction or subtle distortion. Below this vague churning mass, electronic emanations hold forth in a foundation of low-lying drones. Their have the tug of an inescapable gravity. Some will find their studied imaginings a balm for the troubles and griefs, while others will use it simply to still the wheels of an over-worked mind.
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Through his instruments Andy Othling speaks as much to himself as he does to his listeners. Performing and recording as Lowercase Noises his music is shaped by the pressure of ideas and warmth of emotions. Here dramatic power is inseparable from a hushed, sensuous spender. The quieter this work becomes the deeper we may to go inside it. Using electric and acoustic guitars, as well as piano, basic tones are fed through layers of echo and reverberation effects - emerging on the other side completely transformed. Small moments of grace alongside a grand sonic flowering these compositions manage to calm the interior monologue all the while while charging the imagination. Slowly strummed steel strings are sent vibrating through processors, which yield varying new colors of sound. The beautiful arrangements project a rare combination of discipline, instinct and intelligence. Spare and diminutive one moment, thick and dense the next, we must admire the ability of these sonic desires to clear our minds of everything other than the music itself.
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