With only a few releases, the relatively new Moscow-based label Dronarivm found its status as one of contemporary ambient music’s most important labels.
With the release of “Day Has Ended“, with Aaron Martin and Christoph Berg contributing four tracks each, that status is definitely confirmed – if not enhanced.
Both Aaron Martin and Christoph Berg (who is also known as Field Rotation) are composers renowned for their work crossing the borders of ‘ambient soundscapes’ and ‘post-classical’ music. With the cello as their main instruments, most of their music breathe a sad yet beautiful melancholy.
The track titles and cover image of “Day Has Ended“ immediately sets the atmosphere:
“This is quiet, intimate music, interfused with daylight and covered by a soft mist of evening dreams. This album spans the course of a day until the point where night falls.”
It is a ‘split’ CD, which means that Martin and Berg did not collaborate in creating these tracks, but both perform all instruments on their own half of the album. Clearly they knew what kind of album they were aiming for, since there is no clash in style or content – both halves of the album complete each other in describing the course of a single, calm and quiet, contemplative day.
“The first part, created by Aaron Martin, is a water-colour, cool and delicate. The twinkling sun reflected itself in a slow river, transparent silvery clouds sparkle and brush the heads of drowsy trees. The closer to the middle of the album, the lower goes the gentle shadow, saturating.
In the second part – Christoph Berg’s one, water-colour turns into gouache. The sound becomes more full, more sensuous, it comes in waves, like breath of a sleeping man.
Just close your eyes, be all ears and you’ll feel – the night is not silent. Sweet tune of twilight and darkness full of echo, humming blue, vague voice of the strings and clear gleaming of bright stars in a velvet sky – that is the night.”
CHRISTOPH BERG – TODAY HAS BEEN ALRIGHT
