I first discovered the music of Belgian artist ‘t Geruis via his astounding Lost Tribe Sound debut, the strange atmospheric Various Thoughts and Places which felt like something between a woozy degraded field recording and murky sound design. You can read an interview with him here.
To Wonder, To Admire is even more stripped back, more ambient. His use of repetition in particular is nothing short of intoxicating. You fall into this warmth, these waves of sound that seem to just repeat endlessly. The fascination I’ve had with his music really boils down to one question: What stops it from getting monotonous? Why is each repetition even more welcome than the last? I’ve really struggled to answer this, other than to suggest that what is repeating is ridiculously seductive, and there is change, but it happens very very slowly, so it almost feels like its occurring out of earshot. But I’m not entirely sure. Because when you listen to t’Geruis his world is so complete and self assured that it causes you to doubt your own perception and begin to wonder if its playing tricks on you. Time isn’t the same anymore. You wonder if the changes you perceieve are coming from you or the music. At times you two hear two loops working against each other, then one subsumes the other and across 8 odd minutes it all makes sense.
He works with locked grooves yet with enough barnacles on them to slowly alter the timbre of the music without necessarily affecting the structure too much. Like all great ambient music this is a launching pad to dive within. It matters less what is happening structurally to the music because most of us wont hear it. This music is a safe warm place to lie back and let our imagination guide us.
The music is not uniform. Some pieces feel like giant washes of shoegaze, others favour a bottom end throb. It’s wholly electronic, yet its never clear how these pieces were created, what their ingredients are or were. This uncertainty only enhances the experience and it’s the perfect companion piece to Various Thoughts and Places.
