ARTIST.....: STRFKR
TITLE......: Ambient 1
LABEL......: Polyvinyl
GENRE......: Ambient
RIP DATE...: 2020-09-10
RETAIL DATE: 2020-08-28
RUNTIME....: 47:51
SIZE.......: 112,00 MB
QUALITY....: 320Kbps 44.1kHz
ENCODER/CODEC: LAME - MP3 (MPEG-2 AUDIO LAYER 3)
URL........: https://play.google.com/store/music/album?id=Bng7n3e6jzn447wdcrzd7gq2noa
Track List:
01. Rainzow 2:26
02. Work Smoothly Lifetime Peace 5:49
03. Bunji 2:35
04. Kaleidoscope 2:47
05. Telescope 3:00
06. Anxiety 4:59
07. Zee Majoor 3:02
08. Concentrate 5:58
09. Vergeten 1:29
10. Nexus 6:36
11. Zij Aan Zij 5:30
12. Sleep 3:40
Release Notes:
https://starfucker.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-1
While there were four years between STRFKRí»s 2016 album
Being No One, Going Nowhere and their recently released
Future Past Life, the mere months that followed resulted
in the inspired and quickly-architected Ambient 1.
STRFKRí»s sound has morphed over the years through
variations of hyper catchy, danceable pop, but this is
something very different. For a little shy of an hour,
Ambient 1 drifts through softly glowing electronic
instrumentals that extract the synth core from the
groupí»s well established synth pop sound. Ití»s
patient, playful, and calming music that travels through
passageways of chaos and anxiety on a journey towards
healing..
The inspirations for Ambient 1 were as amorphous as the
album itself. Upon completing work on the lo-fi
dreaminess of Future Past Life, STRFKRí»s principal
songwriter Josh Hodges found himself returning
repeatedly to albums by his favorite ambient artists and
minimal composers. This happened in correlation with
stumbling into a wealth of new age cassettes at an
estate sale and a time in Joshua Tree spent excitedly
experimenting with a friendí»s vintage Prophet 5
synthesizer. This growing obsession with synthesis and
the culture around it also concurred with the daily
darkness of the pandemic and some personal disruptions.
Without spending too much time thinking about what it
meant, Hodges began recording ambient experiments almost
daily as a way of processing these difficult emotions.
The music flowed intuitively, and arrived almost fully
formed. Songs took various forms despite their spacious
arrangements. Echoes of masters like Harold Budd and
Brian Eno can be heard in the angelic floating of í░Work
Smoothly Lifetime Peaceí▒ while tracks like í░Nexusí▒
are stormy and frenetic. Slow motion glacial drones melt
into trance-inducing rhythmic patterns on
í░Concentrateí▒ and throughout the album hardware synth
tones bounce across the stereo field, gelling together
for a listening experience thatí»s meditative and
enveloping.
In some ways, Ambient 1 is unlike anything STRFKR has
created before, but when completely absorbed, it makes
sense why ití»s included under the STRFKR banner. Even
at his most drony and experimental, Hodges caní»t escape
his distinctive melodic approach. There are no vocals,
no traditional song structures, almost nothing
resembling the addictive pop the band is known for, but
deep listening reveals a more deconstructed
manifestation of STRFKRí»s meticulously crafted sound.
Ambient 1 strips away the familiar and the expected,
exposing Hodgesí» signature sonic personality at a
granular level.
Record nerds might take the title as a winking reference
to Enoí»s ambient series that yielded genre-defining
albums like Music For Airports. More than that, ití»s a
suggestion that this is the first of several excursions
into ambience from STRFKR. The abstract art that graces
the cover is the work of Micheal Folden, a prolific
Portland-based artist who sadly succumbed to AIDS in the
í«90s. A friend of the Hodges family inherited and cares
for Foldení»s massive collection, and many of his pieces
were displayed in the house where Miracle Mile was
recorded. Another of Foldení»s hundreds of beautifully
obtuse pieces will serve as the cover art for each new
installation of STRFKRí»s ongoing series of ambient
explorations.
As the band continues already more than a decade into
their winding development,
Ambient 1 represents an extension of what STRFKR is
capable of. Hodges' slow-blooming soundscapes and
transcendent webs of synth and percussion might be some
of the most unassuming, circuitous music heí»s ever
made, but it's also some of his most vulnerable work.
The songs guide the listener through complex emotional
territory, ultimately reaching a place of peace and
beauty. Like some of the best ambient music, the
feelings conveyed are all the more intense when theyí»re
communicated without words.