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Band: Conversations About The Light Album: Barren Eyelids Flowering Album Year: 2006 Label: Cipher Productions Genre(s): Noise Ambient Band Website: http://www.catlprod.com
Rating: 6/10 Track List: 1. Everything Beyond this Pane is Sleeping 2. Twilight Scattered Violently By Gasping Curtains 3. Digesting a Sea of Unmapped Words 4. You Need Me (Swans Cover)
A strange CD; I was not sure what to expect upon receiving. The packaging is excellent and unique. Barren Eyelids Flowering, only 18 minutes in length, comes as a MINI-CD packaged in some sort of folded wax paper-like housing, with a beautiful full color square insert, and sealed with wax. A good starting point…and the light, textured packaging is somewhat akin to music on this disc.
The album starts out with a nice ambient flow, it sounds like being on the water at night and staring off at a lighthouse in the distance. Slowly it builds and all of a sudden a tsunami of noise comes and destroys the boat you were enjoying. Each song is a mixture of nice, slow moving ambient and then extremely harsh distortion and chaotic noise. Personally, I don’t like noise very much and it is hard for me to get into this album or have any desire to listen to it. But, despite that I have to say that it is pretty well constructed and it is a good album overall. Conversations About the Light knows how to blend the destructive nature of noise together with the textures of smooth ambient in such a way that the two styles compliment each other. Unfortunately, the majority of ‘music’ here is grating harsh noise, although to it’s benefit, it is done as if creating ambient music and so it becomes this sort of ambient atmospheric noise. It moves slowly and builds and pushes forward with its infinite patience and dissonance. There are subtle changes, even during the harsh noise which keeps the album dynamic… The parts that are done as more traditional ambient are have subtle melodic qualities and almost a post-rock feel to them. “Digesting a Sea of Unmapped Words” Is the most ambient tracks here, and yet it has a very post-hardcore feel to it, almost in the vein of Isis or similar acts whose names escape me at this moment. This track is like watching the vivid orange glow of a street light on a dead street corner while the rest of the world is shrouded within a veil of darkness. The atmosphere on this track is amazing and I personally wish that the entire album was done in this way, although the noise is definitely something which I have never heard before on an ambient album. The track is very dynamic and it ends up going through many different emotional tones before coming to a close. I have never heard the original “you need me” by Swans, so I cannot compare this track to that. The cover is very short and very noisey. It sounds like the entire track was run through a great deal of distortion and as a result there is too much emphasis on the high end and the low end has disappeared. I think it is an interesting way to cover a song, although it isn’t something I would listen to again. Although, if you are a fan of the sort of music that Swans makes, you may be able to appreciate this more than I. Overall the album is well constructed; the songs have many “parts” to them as they constantly change and cycle through evolving and devolving shades of soundscape. It is depressing and violent; sometimes beautiful and sometimes wretched, discordant, harsh turmoil. It is a hard album to get into because of the severe contrast between ambient and harsh noise, but if you are a fan of both genres and want to hear them together then you will love this album. I couldn’t get into the harsh noise sections, but they are done in a way that is good for noise music and the entire album carries a very post-rock/post-hardcore feel to it which I think sets it apart from many other ambient style acts. I would like to hear more from CATL, but although this album is unique and interesting, it is just not the thing I could personally listen to often, if ever.
-[.d4n b4rr3tt.]
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