COREY FULLER – BREAK 
Corey Fuller – also known as one half of the Illuha duo – presents his first solo album on the 12k label. Not his first solo album, mind you: previous albums were released on Dragon’s Eye Recording (Seas Between, 2009) and White Paddy Mountain (Euphotic, with Chihei Hatakeyama, 2016). But hist first on 12k.
The album opens with an impressive 15 minute work called Seiche, divided in three parts: Adrift, Asunder and Aground. Another long-form piece is Look Into The Heart Of Light, The Silence with 13+ minutes. The other tracks are relatively short.
But all the tracks have the same impact: a striking balance between daring sound sculptures and emotional melodies.
Break ‘focuses intensely on melody and harmony, on carefully composed progressions. Highly melodic, the work pulls and churns between harmony and tension, weight and air, the crash of a wave, the pull of the undertoe. […] An emotional riptide where violence and rest struggle to be the last voice.’
This (unusual?) display of human emotions (in the use of voice especially) embedded in sometimes soft, but sometimes also rather physical soundscapes, is where this album differs from many other more ‘academic’ and ‘formulaic’ ambient/electronic music. This music is not just a set of fascinating soundscapes to listen to, its message directly touches the heart.
It is, indeed, a ‘highly emotional’ album, ‘addressing the universality of human struggle – the idea that we as humans all share many of the same difficulties.’
It may very well be my interpretation, but I feel that Break tells us that we all have to be very careful not to lose things that we will dearly miss when they are gone forever.
GLÅSBIRD – GRØNLAND
Harry Towell’s Whitelabrecs label tirelessly continues to release interesting music. Usually the releases are available in limited editions (50), but for this debut Glåsbird album it is increased to 100 copies.
Glåsbird is an anonymous artist: no further information is provided. For this ‘sonic expedition around Greenland’, (he? she?) they imagined that ‘they were assigned the task of scoring a soundtrack to a film about Greenland and spent a great deal of time researching the subject.’
The music is beautifully orchestrated – like a soundtrack indeed – with lush string and piano sounds, moving somewhere between ambient music and modern classical music.
It is described as ‘glacial’ and ‘icy’: “We’re told that the artist even recorded some sections of sounds to cassette before placing the tape in the freezer to give an added chill factor.”
But in fact I experience it more as warm and comfortable.
Perhaps like imagining sitting near the fireplace in the little house on the beautiful cover image.