In February 2018, I resolved to spend an entire month listening to music I was not already a fan of and sit down to write about a page’s worth about them. It was meant to be an effort towards thinking about a given album, EP or artist for the duration it takes to fill a page with coherent thoughts.
Needless to say this didn’t last at all and, after a few sporadic attempts, I gave up.
What this is, is essentially a bunch of documents containing vaguely polished versions of my impression of certain pieces of music. I do not have clarity on what this will become and I will make it up along the way. But this is a great excuse for you, the reader, to check out some new music.
- Sumanth, 2018
I recently discovered some of these notes while clearing up my cloud storage and decided that it would be an excellent idea to share my reviews from 2 years ago with you over the course of the next few Dream Deficit Zone updates. Here’s the first one:
Isle Enchanted - Wave Temple (Feb 1, 2018)
Isle Enchanted isn’t so much of an album as it is an expansive soundscape. It swells and fades without asking for attention and allows you as a listener to fill empty spaces with your perception of the real, work and thoughts. This makes the additive experience of this Wave Temple album so much more interesting.
There are so many moments where I think I hear something I like, while it actually doesn’t exist. The idea of playing music from memory over familiar noise-scapes is a oft-pursued idea, most notably an inspiration for Popcorn Superhet Receiver.
Isle Enchanted sticks to its theme of tranquil waters and sets itself on the bed of rise and ebb of tide - and tape hiss. The persistent sounds from both sources fill each other’s gaps to create an interesting hybrid of natural and machine noise. Over this sits an interesting array of tape-delayed samples and field recordings.
Something about about this album feels very contemporary french; probably the notion of sampling to create an additive world. In some ways it is surrealist too, in that these sounds do not necessarily belong in the same context despite being very compatible.
There will be more of these.
👋