Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Welder: Florescence | inyourspeakers.com

Brendan Angelides has a knack for making paradoxical music. Music that is as rich and emotive on the first listen as the hundredth while simultaneously being difficult to digest. Releasing slightly more up-beat, edgy music as Eskmo (not to be confused with the British psytrace producer Eskimo; my mind always wants to insert the 'i' subconsciously) on various indie electronic labels, most recently Ninja Tune, Welder is Angelides’s softer, ambient side. Florescence, on his own label, Ancestor, shows just how far his mellower alter-ego has developed in the half-decade since his first full-length release, Vines and Stream. Welder used to be just a slightly-calmer shadow of Eskmo; now he enters a realm few electronic artists ever tread.

The only artist who comes to mind to compare to this latest release is a name few non-gaming fans of electronic music know—Jeremy Soule. Soule is a master of emulating real instrumentation so well that you can’t distinguish the electronic from the organic. Much like those soundtracks, the backbone of Florescence—piano, drums, and cello—are so indistinguishable from a live recording the distinction is meaningless. Without background knowledge, the music sounds like a cellist, guitarist, drummer, and pianist got together and recorded it. This persists from the opening pizzicato-ed cello and drums in "Run" all the way through the hauntingly beautiful whistles, piano, guitar, and oh-so-faint drums in "Winter in the Hills."

Speaking of winter in the hills, with the sudden onset of winter here in Missoula I’ve been forced to do quite a bit of walking around town. The strange mix of peaceful ambience and occasionally insistent drums makes for a perfect soundtrack for wintry walks through town, to say nothing of the parallels between the organic/electronic dichotomy present in the album and strolling through a town just-large-enough to pollute a beautiful confluence of five mountain valleys. Perhaps the best track to capture this (and the feel of the album as a whole) is "Japan," particularly at 2:01 when the cello lets itself be heard. As good as the music is at capturing this singular feeling, the narrow focus left me with the disconcerting feeling that I was missing something once the music ended. Much like the indefinite "seriously weird mood" his self-titled Eskmo release gave us a year ago.

On the whole, though, this is an amazing work that is much more developed than how Angelides initially introduced the world to Welder. That I had to go out of my way into the world of video game music to find a comparable sound shows how unique this record is. This newly developed identity for Brendan has the potential to be so much more than even his well-loved primary musical persona, Eskmo. We as listeners can only hope that these split-personalities continue to drift further apart.

Tracklist
1. Run
2. Yellow Yellow
3. L…Carousel…C
4. Japan
5. Rusten Sienna
6. I Still
7. Be My Light
8. Skybend
9. Florescence
10. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
12. Winter in the Hills

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