Following on from 2019’s ‘Everything Is Coloured’, ‘We Were The Moon’ is another fine, mellow yet complex work from Dutch instrumental act Eskina. Its ten ambient oriented pieces have very strong roots of chamber music, with a dominant cello and viola used effectively throughout, and by twisting through arrangements with slight overtones of prog and plenty of massive soundtrack-like moods, the musicians create something that’s both rich and rewarding.
Tag Archives: ambient
VINCENT CARR’S SUMIC – Strolling Early Morning
One of the UK prog scene’s true underground talents, Vincent Carr’s complex acoustic work and love for pastoral soundscapes has helped create some interesting recordings over the years. On 2016’s ‘Rekindled’ he injected a very strong British folk rock vibe into some largely instrumental pieces, and on the follow up, ‘New Paeans’, he truly unleashed his inner Mike Oldfield on lengthy arrangements that blended prog, new age sounds and a hefty dose of acoustic complexity. Obviously he was working on a thousandth of Oldfield’s basic 70s budget, but the outcome certainly wasn’t in any way inferior. After that, Vince released a couple of ambient, improvised works that showed off yet another side to his talent. Those were approached with interest by a few of his biggest online champions, but were never designed for mass acceptance.
BILLY YFANTIS – Noises From The Outer Space
On the follow up to 2020’s ‘Entering The Solar System’, Billy Yfantis delves even deeper into a world of ambient sound and disquieting electronica. Although feeling very much like a continuation of previous works, in some ways, ‘Noises From The Outer Space’ offers a very different listening experience. ‘Solar System’ gave listeners fairly easily digestible bursts of sound, best demonstrated via ‘Venus’ (a collection of very retro sounding synth noises and laser bursts not too dissimilar to an old Jarre work) and ‘Sun’ which dispensed most elements of melody in favour of a scratchier synthesized backdrop which quickly sounded like a musical shorthand for feeling detached. By contrast, ‘…Outer Space’ opts for massive blankets of sound of a far more minimalist nature.
VINCENT CARR’S SUMIC – New Paeans
Vincent Carr’s fifth album ‘Rekindled’ (released under the name Vincent Carr’s SUMIC in 2016) was one of the year’s most pleasant surprises. Taking influences from Nick Drake, John Martyn, various 70s prog bits and a smidgeon of trad English folk, the album took the listener on a very pastoral musical journey. Traces of Freddie Phillips’ children’s TV scores also added to the album’s very English qualities. It was an album only heard by a relative few, but those who did, invariably loved it.
THE QUIET ROOM – Manuscript
In 2015, singer songwriter Matt Cahill took a break from his main band Evoletah to experiment with multi-instrumentalist Andrew Muecke and create something that would be so different from everything he’d recorded before. There’s no point in having side projects if they end up being too similar to your regular band, of course, but with The Quiet Room’s ‘All The Frozen Horses’, it’s unlikely that many Evoletah fans expected anything close to the sounds that materialised. Instead of atmospheric, guitar driven rock, The Quiet Room were all about keyboards, space and a cold spookiness.