Archive for July, 2020

When I woke up this morning I was looking forward to starting the day with this new Celer box that landed on my desk during my absence. For a week my days had started without ambient music (but the talking of a bunch of children; not ambient at all, not complaining either), so it would be good to have a slow day of ambient music and much-needed rest. To start with my disappointment; I had hoped these albums would be at least forty-five minutes long of the signature slow Celer music, but preferably a bit longer. Well, I got the signature sound, but these discs are quite short, thirty-two to forty minutes each. I understand why Celer wants to put these out as single discs and not a double CD with all four pieces (it would easily fit), giving each all the space it needs (and maybe allowing for some adventurous mixing, should you have the means to do so). Each of the pieces, so I am told, is created with tape loops containing digital and acoustic instruments, field recordings and foley sounds. A piece starts with all the layers playing, but throughout it, there are minimal changes, slowly altering colour, spacing and placing of the sounds. None of this seems to be in regular sequence, which I like very much. If you listen superficially these seem to be gentle drones, with a slight orchestral feel to it (especially ‘Nothing Will Change’), but upon closer inspection, these loops are a bit less regular and small shifts take place in the music. This is certainly the sort of ambient music that Brian Eno was thinking of when he coined the term and added ‘to be pleasurable and ignorable’ (or among such lines). As said, for me, all four of these pieces could have been much longer than this, even up to the full length of a CD (times four! Yummy!), but that is the only downside of this for me. Nothing will change is perhaps also what one can say about the music by Celer, but maybe you can say the same about the quality of the music. Nothing will change there either; excellent all around.