Olan Mill’s debut Pine skirts the fuzzy line, and I mean fuzzy, between ambient and neo-classical. Like Nest’s Retold, the Serein label’s previous release, Olan Mill’s Alex Smalley and Svitlana Samoylenko draw basic melodic figures with acoustic instruments – piano, violin, pipe organ and guitar – and obfuscate these patterns with digital effects, blurring individual elements into hazy swathes of sound. Instrumental traces remain, but the overall impression is one of synthesis, and synthesisers, ebbing and flowing in warm, grandiose, billowy clouds.
There’s a beautiful simplicity to their underlying ‘tunes’ which recalls the Arvo Part of ‘Fur Alina’, particularly on the repeated two-chord phrase of opener ‘Spare Smoke Template’, but the manner in which the reverb is slathered on, smearing strings into heavenly choirs, recalls Kompakt’s Pop Ambient practitioners – particularly old hands Markus Guentner and Ulf Lohmann. Like Kompakt, Olan Mill work in miniature; most tracks are around three minutes. But where Guentner and Lohmann condense emotion and drama into short spaces, here little development takes place, and little is demanded. Of course that’s what ambient music is largely about, but the ceaseless wash of pretty sound does threaten to numb. The short durations thus work in their favour, and the music works best when acoustic instruments and sources are most clearly presented. The pithy, open chords on ‘The Prescribed Inidividual’, played on rickety piano with audible pedal clunk, melds gorgeously with the pads, highlighting the instrument’s fragility, and the echoing rainfall of track ‘Country’ is also impressive. There’s very little to fault with Pine, but equally little to get worked up about, which may be exactly their point.
Joshua Meggitt
*
