Zilverhill - Laodicean

It's summer and it's quite difficult to listen to calm music. It was the same with this CD that I've found in my post box by surprise. Zilverhill is Tim Bayes, disappearing and reappearing in industrial scene for almost 30 years and Paul Carr. This CD is the 3rd already full length album of this duo. I don't even know if I could qualify this record as ambient. It's a soundscape, trip, which, according to promo text, documents shared indifference towards ignorance that we, as a species, should avoid. The idea itself is rather complex and I can't say neither that it was represented correctly in this album nor other way around. The sound interests me more and here I get a rather dual impression. There is one long track with play time of 45 minutes in this album and it is divided into 10 logical, thematic and sound parts. It's like one big picture, divided into smaller ones. When talking about visuals, we can say that some smaller parts in the whole picture can be not interesting, boring, not attractive for our eyes and so on because the necessary part of the bigger picture is visualised in them and sometimes these small, dull details is a must for good and complete final result. But when we are talking about music, I think you cannot excuse dull parts of the album in the same way. There are lots of details and rudiments of melodies that are very quickly interrupted and developed into other logical part of the album or different sounds. The beginning sounds good - sound of horns, whispering, percussion or something like that and so on while the sound evolves into sort of guitar drone with pitched down voice. "Horror ambient" like sounds glimpse and we come to the middle of the album. And it's like some sort of an empty hole. Somewhere around 10 minutes of distant field recordings that simply disappears from the overall context of the album. After that conditional pause of silence, it is even more difficult to get further into the album - louder and clearer moments are exchanged for the more silent ones and the disc ends. Weird light moments in the disc are displaced by dark droney passages and calm melodies evolve into distant experiments of field recordings, mixture of voices or guitar. There are quite a lot of beautiful moments in the disc and the overall approach to the sounds is professional, but on the whole there is nothing impressive about this work. As for me there are too many big contrasts and episodes of sound changing too quickly. It seems that musicians want to tell you so much and tries to put absolutely everything they thought of in these 45 minutes. There is no time to enjoy separate musical elements (like fantastic last 10 minutes of the disc). For resume I could say that as for dark ambient album, Laodicean is too scattered and it lacks expression as an experimental album. It hangs somewhere there, in the middle between these two genres and barely says anything to your mind or heart. A rather average work.

Format: CD
Released: 2012
Label: Adept Sound, Blind Shouter
Edition: 300

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