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.
© Rick Anderson /TiVo