Chihei Hatakeyama – Above The Desert (Dronarivm)

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To me, the true test of ambient music is whether or not it takes you to a different place. It should disconnect you from the mundane in such a way as to remain almost unnoticeable, and then transport you to a gentle place born of no-one but yourself. You should drift, empty-headed and at peace, the music a cocoon, a cushion, a blanket, and yet simultaneously a slow-flowing river carrying you along. In fact, you should barely even be aware of the transition from song to song; these transitions should exist more as the gap between an ebb and a flow, a brief and natural pause before the eternal procession rolls on.

With Above The Desert, Japanese sound artist and musician Chihei Hatakeyama has created what I consider, in my limited experience with the genre, a perfect piece of calm and empty spaciousness.

Long and drawn-out hums, feedbacks, drones and treated sounds pulse and throb at a pace almost glacial, so slow and steady that they seem to somehow be moving and standing still at the same time. More often than not, Hatakeyama lets only one or two sounds interact at a time, so that rather than be confronted by a dense wall we instead are given an incredible amount of space in which to psychologically lose ourselves. Sometimes his music is like the breath of the earth or the drift of the continents, the soundtrack of processes so ponderous as to be almost beyond human comprehension. Sometimes it’s like a low wind that rises to a gale so imperceptibly that you’re not even aware of it until it’s upon you. Only in Above The Desert there is no gale, just the inexorable thrum continuing on and on, changing so slowly within a narrow frame of reference that it doesn’t seem to be changing at all.

Let’s face it: There’s no need to break Above The Desert down song by song. It transitions seamlessly, the breaks between songs virtually unnoticeable; and besides, ambient music isn’t about the individual songs per se, but about the mood created and the way in which it is sustained. In Above The Desert, Chihei Hatakeyama has created a mood so restful and boundless that any fan of the genre will love it and anyone unfamiliar with it will find themselves transfixed.

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