South Korean/ Japanese couple/duo Tengger have a new album out, produced during and inspired by their holidays. And that’s a beautiful thing.
Their bandcamp site talks about “making yearly pilgrimages to dazzling locales, recording their music among unfamiliar cultures and environments, and in turn creating sounds imbued with a lush environmental thrum.”
Suddenly my holidays feel distinctly less productive. They call their music spiritual drone and even reference new age music, which feels very apt, however this album with its electronic pulses and sense of repetition, feels closer to the work of Florian Fricke’s German collective Popol Vuh. This is gorgeous ambient electronic music. There is a peacefulness to both the pacing and arrangements of the sounds, with their amalgamation of harmonium and synthesizers, drifting heavily reverbed vocals, and occasional field recordings of birds and water. This is music that washes right through you, cleansing you in the process.
There’s something almost reverential about the music, perhaps even spiritual. Clearly the duo know a lot about space. They’re content to simply exist there, to be. They understand the power of the sounds they create. They don’t layer excessively or perform any compositional tricks, but this tripped out elongated experiential psychedelic music feels like a tonic in these troubled times. Inherent in the music is the joy they experienced in creating it. And that’s what I want in music.
