‘Xiexie’ is a Chinese word meaning ‘thank you, thanks’. When Will Long went to China he bought a dictionary but in the end, only used this word. These two CDs reflect something of that trip to China, using four field recordings as starting points. So the first CD opens with some street sounds and people talking but then slowly, over the course of two minutes moves from fading out these street sounds and the drones then move in and slowly, as ever with Celer, transform from one thing to the next. Music that is like cascading waves breaking on the beach, but all in slow motion. In ‘Rains Lit By noon’ (disc one, second track) there is a pleasant mild distortion to be noticed but the piece ends near silence before going into ‘In The Middle Of The Moving Field’, which the kind of Celer you know best, flowing beautifully and right at the end the next field recordings come in and that’s only a brief fragment of a train at 303 Km/h (you could have fooled me) and two more lengthy drone pieces. Throughout it seemed to me that the pieces on the second disc were a bit more ‘distorted’; you have to count in that in the quiet world of Celer anything ‘less quiet’ may count as a bit distortion. There is of course not really ‘noise’ on this record, far from it; it just is a little something different, and occasionally at that, that is going on here, such as in the closing track ‘Our Dream To Be Strangers’. That makes that this Celer is a bit different from many of his other works, and while not a radical break with the old ‘Celer’, for me at least quite a surprise. Also available on 2LP!