Band: Rapoon

Album: Time Frost

Album Year: 2007

Label:  Glacial Movements Records

Genre(s): Deep isolationist ambient

Website: www.glacialmovements.com

Rating: 7/10

Track listing:

1 GLACIAL DANUBE (06:08)

2 THIN LIGHT (06:13)

3 A DARKNESS OF SNOW (06:51)

4 HORIZON DISCRETE (05:36)

6 ICE WHISPERS (34:18)

The very latest release from this Italian cold ambient label is from the UK’s Rapoon, otherwise known as Robin Storey, ex member of legendary northern ‘ambient industrialists’ Zoviet France. Time Frost is centred around two ideas: one, in an apparent paradox, is that the present threat of global warming will not result in a general warming of the earth but instead plunge us back into an ice age (it goes something like this I believe but any climatologists out there please feel free to jump in and correct me...  it has something to do with the observed fact that over the last couple of decades atmospheric temperatures have cooled and also that meltwater from the Greenland icesheet is changing salinity levels in the ocean and disrupting the flow of currents that help to keep the northern hemisphere ice-free by releasing heat... so if those currents can’t do their job properly then there’s the possibility we may yet be covered by miles-thick ice sometime in the next tens of thousands of years....); and two, taking tiny fragments of Johann Strauss’s “Blue Danube” and subjecting them to manipulation, stretching and looping with the idea being that each fragment represents a surviving piece of a former civilisation locked in a future sea of ice and consequently being discovered and interpreted by archaeologists. It is interesting how something as famous as Strauss’s signature waltz can be rendered unrecognisable and unintelligible in such a way and yet still retain a strong sense of icy  beauty and vitality whilst simultaneously creating a sonic backdrop to beautiful yet alluringly dangerous landscapes. “Thin Light” is an eternally stately waltz swirling its way through the snowfall, the dancers appearing and disappearing through gaps in the curtain of flakes whilst “A Darkness of Snow” is the heavy crush of white that inevitably envelops all that which slows its step and finally stops it, the cold sapping the strength and the consciousness drifting off into blessed oblivion. The peril continues to stalk in “Horizon Discrete”, an edgy tension accompanied by heavy exhalations, skitterings and paddings, a disorienting and placeless keening overarching all, but whether created by voice or natural sound remains undetermined. We are after all witnessing nature at her most serenely desolate...

The final half-hour track “Ice Whispers” endeavours (and succeeds in my opinion) to capture the essential moods of a frozen landscape, from sweeping freezing winds to calm motionless serenity and seeming stasis, building and building, where blizzards turn everything in sight to a blinding white nothing, and what was once familiar becomes transformed into a formless featureless blinding blanket of television static. It is also a narrative of possible catastrophe, when in an effort to stop the pestilential infection nature unleashes the strongest arsenal to wipe out the parasite as fully and as effectively as possible...

Yes there is a beauty to all the pieces on offer here, but more importantly there is also an unnerving undercurrent of cold menace lurking just behind the facade of prettiness, just like the staggeringly monolithic sculpted forms of the glaciers and icebergs gracing our TV screens in those National Geographic specials – we see them mostly in their benign aspect, picturesque and unthreatening, designed to elicit a response to their undoubted ‘ooh’ factor, but we must also be aware of the unseen strength and hidden danger, as the ghosts of the Titanic would be only too keen to remind us..

Recommended.