Even though it is a benevolent, life-giving giant, the sun eventually bleaches everything that passes under it. In this series of vignettes, Jannick Schou´s drones are bathed in light but faded, a little grainy and overexposed, with those Kodak colours that only existed on film in the sixties, never in nature. Form follows function – they were made out of another medium subject to wear and tear, magnetic audio tape.
The drone is commonly associated with the dark and low-down, but it doesn´t have to be that way. With a title borrowed from Milan Kundera´s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Schou does an impressive job portraying the puff of smoke we are inside our mortal skins. The recurring tweet-tweet of a small bird on ´Departure´ sounds like imprisonment; no matter how beautiful she sings, that bird sounds caught and I don´t think she´s ever going to get loose. But rather than dwell on the inevitable end, Schou´s album, tremulous and emotional as it may be, is ultimately optimistic and uplifting.
Although his recording career only stretches back a few years in time, Schou has already established himself – partly under the monicker of “Cylon” – as a mature artist worth watching for. Self-released in Denmark the year before, the discriminating, dark ambient label Dead Pilot Records in the UK insisted quite justifiably on the necessity of a re-release.
Stephen Fruitman
