This year the mothership Mystery Sea was very quiet – zero releases – but the sister division Unfathomless did well. So well, that the mothership now returns on CD, and no longer on CDR. Chubby Wolf was the name used for solo projects by Danielle Baquet-Long, one half of Celer, who passed away in 2010. The only other solo release I heard from her was ‘Meandering Pupa’ (see Vital Weekly 678), which come as a set of four business card CDRs, and which I thought was not much different than her with Celer. Here she uses field recordings, by which most likely (judging on what I heard) it is meant to be recordings of the sea, plucked cello/violin, morse code and electronics, with some ‘additional aural debris by Mathhiue Ruhlmann’, who also did the mastering. As before here too we have something that is not much different from her work with Will Long in Celer: long stretched out patterns of interwoven sound, with perhaps the clarity of the water sounds here being more present than in the work of Celer – the small amount I actually heard from them. This is one of those things were one wonders if we should look at this in terms of hearing something new or wether this is just great atmospheric music with nothing new under the sun. I think it’s save to say the first the latter. I didn’t hear anything here that I haven’t heard before, even some better at that, and Chubby Wolf is nothing new under the sun. Now, should I care about that? No, actually I don’t care. It’s winter time, it’s dark, inside it’s cosy and warm, a stack of unread books is never far away, and this is great music: what more can you wish for? Perhaps that’s the whole point of music anyway?

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