The mysterious entity behind No Mind Meditation constantly refuses to be labeled and pigeonholed and sets itself apart from the rest of the tape drone scene by being way too varied and “littered” to be actually considered copy-pasting dreamy floaty stuff. A series of adventurous synth-driven sound collages, this monster of an album (double c57 housed in a box set) is sure to feed all your need for spaced out trippertonics.
Just like the collages featured in the booklet blending ancient, religious and occult imagery with modern inventions, such as computer graphics, highways and skyscrapers, the music on the album is an amorphous, abstract cloud of classic New Age worship and more modern, colder (or rather, sharper) sounds. For No Mind Meditation the pastoral, analog ambience is the fertile ground from which he(she?they?) take(s) them further and ornaments it with all sorts of seemingly accidental dissonances, random notes or outbursts of almost harsh noise. It is music for meditation without becoming music for sleep; the constant glitches, loops and synthesizer hiccups serve as sonic needles that prick you just as you’re trying to fall asleep.
Most of the music in the album stays in the “corrupted dreamy ambience” territory and are pretty enormous in length, taking up entire sides of both cassettes – between 25 and 27 minutes each. The album becomes most interesting when it takes some serious paths into the area of deconstruction – like side A on the second tape, when the oneiric, soft droning jam is gradually munched and gnawed by acidic electronic – a treatment similar to the synth abuse of Sunroof! or Caboladies’ newest album, Renewable Destination.
The ambient of No Mind Meditation is far removed from the largely featureless and smooth ambient of Sky Stadium or Stitched Vision. Rather, the creator behind this projects understand ambient and drone as “background music” and a mean to get to the weirder zones than an end in itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment