Celer comprised by husband and wife Will Long y Danielle Basquet-Long formed in 2004 with a string of releases, remixes and compilation appearances in several independent labels in North America, Europe and Japan. Danielle was involved in education, poetry, painter and she was music-instrumentalist and vocalist. She passed away in July 2009. Will is a published writer. “Dying Star” was recorded in 2008 and it was an improvisation work using an analog synthesizer with no overdubs and post-processing. The album is recorded in a very low volume and the waves of drones spread out through an endless soundtrack of a perfect setting for the end of the day.

Celer se compone de Will Long y Danielle Basquet-Long, marido y mujer quienes se formaron en 2004 editado varios discos, remezclas y en compilados en sellos independientes de Norte América, Europa y Japón. Danielle se desenvolvía en el campo de la educación, la poesía, pintura y era multi instrumentalista y vocalista. Falleció en julio de 2009. Will es escritor. “Dying Star” fue grabado en 2008 y fue un trabajo de improvisación en el que se utilizó sintetizador análogo, sin procesamiento ni sobre mezclas. El álbum está grabado a bajo volumen y las ondas de drones crean una infinita banda sonora para un el ocaso de final del día.

www.loop.cl

Stasis is an exciting musical tool. If used in the best sense, stasis is what makes ambient music connect to the that place where mind, soul and heart of the listener connect and starts to vibrate there. Maybe this is the reason, why a lot of people like to fall asleep to ambient music of this kind, and to give you a little glimpse into my private sphere, there is a special stack of CDs that are all collected for the purpose of supporting a gentle slide into slumber. I like sleeping a lot, by the way (another glimpse into my privacy for you – seems as if I am laying my bare soul open to you here…) because it is cheap, refreshing and provides good health. But sleeping is not the only static motion there is. Watching a swarm of little insects that move in wild, erratic and unpredictable moves but nevertheless the whole swarm seems to stay put over a certain place. The endless instream of waves at the beach. The endless hum of cars on the motorway, especially at night, looking down from the eleventh floor at the traffic below.

Celer use nothing but one analogue synthesizer and a mixing board to open up a single wave of sound, which nevertheless opens into a multitude of layers once you have immersed yourself in them, that flow gently and almost without movement from the back to the forth and back again in your mind. There is a reason they recommend headphones and low volume. It seems as if nothing at all is happening most of the time. As if time itself stands still and there is no tomorrow to come. Even though there are a couple of specifically named titles on here, it does sound like one big track of echoing and flowing sound. One hour of tranquility of this kind helps me to re-charge my energy levels for another week of stress, toil and schedules. Leaning back, feeling the soft wind around my head, the sun on my clothes, the sounds of a distant church bell and of somebody working in the kitchen through the headphones, is just a perfect moment. Thank you, whoever contributed to it, from Celer to the people near and distant and finally to nature itself for adding a constant hum and rustle. (no thanks go out to the Austrian airforce who likes to use Sunday noon for training flights…)

There is a tragic story to Celer, which I thought about leaving out of this review, as it may seem like I am trying my first steps into low brow writing and sensational journalism, but which cannot be left out once the people behind Celer are presented. Danielle Baquet-Long and Will Long were a couple and produced these intimate, subtle and sensitive pieces together, until Danielle Baquet-Long died of heart failure in 2009. Which ended Celer, but as there are still a lot of works and recordings unpublished, there is more to come I am sure. As the idea of losing someone you love is about the worst thing imaginable to me, I want to refrain from speculations about how deep and intimate relationships may also shape the music that is produced in such a constellation. It can be felt. 3 Seconds of Air (the new project by Vidna Obmana aka Fear Falls Burning) has a similar constellation plus a close friend on the second guitar. It adds something. But losing the fundaments of this, of course, puts an end to this as well.

Death is impossible to think about and even harder to come to terms with (excluding the decision to ignore it). Any good art carries with it at least a small dose something beyond our regular lives, something of the eternal mysteries of life itself (birth, death, the fact of a living, breathing nature,…) which might either be tackled philosophically or spiritually. Both are the same amount helpless. The title “dying star”, the cover showing a sundown or song titles such as “I could almost disperse” or “how I imagine my hand holds yours” put more context to the situation. It is a wonderful thing to listen to these pieces and let your mind flow steadily, remembering experiences and people past and present.

http://www.monochrom.at/cracked/reviews/Rev%20celer.htm

With the passing away of Danielle Baquet-Long, Celer also stopped. But her husband Will Long devotes himself to releasing all the works that they composed together. So ‘Panoramic Dreams Bathed In Seldomness’ was recorded in 2006 and 2007 and uses field recordings from Pakistan, India and Nepal, as well as a ney, skateboard, titles, cello, violin, electronics, contact microphones, micro cassettes, bontempi 9 organ, electronics, piano, reel-to-reel, splicing and mixing board. Celer has released quite some material over the years, so those who ‘know’ them, know what to expect. I wasn’t surprised by this. Well no entirely. A piece like ‘Who Feels Like Me, Who Wants Like Me, Who Doubts Any Good Will Come Of This’ is a classic textbook Celer piece: long sustaining sounds, which flow like weightless material in orbit. That is still the majority of Celer’s music and that’s good. It is what we expect, I guess, and that’s a good thing. I really didn’t expect them to change that much. What puts
the icing on this particular cake is the effective and sparse use of field recordings, which add a nice extra layer to the music, an aspect of exotica. Hissy, mysterious and creating an otherworldy aspect. That makes this particular Celer a somewhat even greater release than many others by them. (FdW)

I dog ear the pages
Because it is
Humorous

I drink cold tea
Because
It was waiting
For us…

I’ll spend this night
Not sleeping, it’s costly
But I could always

Apply for another credit card?

We should acquire a stack of
Them &
Play Gin!

Celer is the musical offspring of Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long, a husband and wife whose posthumous discography now runs into the dozens. Typically their ethereal drones are composed from highly processed recordings of environmental sound or acoustic instruments such as piano, violin and flute. Their recent album on Dragon’s Eye, Dying Star, is both one of their most subdued sonically, and one of the sparsest in sonic origins, using only an analog synthesizer and a mixing board. Granted, analog synthesizers can produce a wide variety of sound, but the sound world here is remarkably consistent, a steady pitch with gently hovering overtones. Volume is generally low and events are few, a thinning or thickening of the harmonic texture and an occasional ringing emphasis in the overtones. The surface calm and relative homogeneity seems especially apt for an album entitled Dying Star.

Although the album is divided into eight tracks, there is only subtle audible differences to distinguish them in the listener’s ear. Celer often uses track boundaries for purposes other than delineating musical divisions, and the track titles read like one of the poems that have graced other albums or Celer’s blog. Track boundaries are an unusual playground for sound artists. The Hafler Trio, in its long search to challenge perception, released CDs where the track layout didn’t correspond in the slightest to the sequence of individual pieces. But I don’t think this is Celer’s motivation, which almost seems more like an acknowledgment of the essential disordered quality of the spiritual and emotional states presented by their music.

Yet despite the seeming placidity of the Dying Star’s trajectory, the album’s most poignant moment comes at the beginning of the final track. Flickers (Goodnight) is the only track that doesn’t begin in silence, but instead is crossfaded directly from its predecessor. Even more significant, its continuing drone is overlaid with the only two even mildly percussive events, aptly characterized by the flickers in the track title, coming at the very beginning of the track and echoed about forty seconds in. These two events, so quiet as to be barely suggested, and appearing only after forty minutes of quiet undulating drones, are Dying Star’s hidden treasure. Is it the dying star finally imploding, creating a brief flash all too easily overlooked? Has the listener drifted into an oblivious somnolence and heard it only in his or her dreams? Celer makes a call to the listener’s attention and imagination and thereby elevates this release to one of their best.

Dying Star is released on Dragon’s Eye and is available in their shop or from various distributors worldwide.

– Caleb Deupree

http://classicaldrone.blogspot.com/2010/09/quietly-dying-star.html

To anyone even passingly interested in drone or ambient music the name Celer has become a byword for all that’s finest within these genres. Recorded and mixed between mid 2006 and late 2007, this four-piece, hour-long collection is among the most substantial and sonically varied works within the Celer discography and arrives with a mastering treatment courtesy of 12k boss Taylor Deupree. Apparently billed as a collection of “elliptical love songs”, Panoramic Dreams Bathed In Seldomness certainly stretches the parameters of what might be intimated by the term “song”, harnessing as it does a lulling stream of conscious that takes in strings, old synthesizers, tape sounds and a host of dissolved field recordings captured by the late Danielle Baquet-Long during trips to Pakistan, India and Nepal. During the album’s first half, the tone of Celer’s music switches between the grainy somnambulance of free-flowing opener ‘Anticline Rests: Inertia Brace Yourself’ and the more studied microsound adventures of ‘Collections Of Fogs and Ladling Clarities’. By the end of this latter piece low-end tones begin to exert a melodic influence that seems to cue up the luscious extroversion of ‘Who Feels Like Me, Who Wants Like Me, Who Doubts Any Good Will Come Of This’. For this third composition the duo make a blissful, orchestral sound that drifts elegiacally over a too-short twelve minutes. Somewhere between Stars Of The Lid and William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, this has to rank as one of Celer’s strongest short-form work to date. Finally, the album bows out with ‘How Dead This Ear Of Reason, Beneath The Backlit Sun’, a collage of loops and ever so slightly discordant drones that formulates an intoxicating clash of ear-flooding tone and fragmentary melody. Recommended.

http://boomkat.com/cds/333224-celer-panoramic-dreams-bathed-in-seldomness

Though the creation of new Celer material officially ended in July 2009 following Danielle Baquet-Long ‘s premature death at the age of twenty-six, Celer recordings are still being released, thanks to the stewardship of Will Long, and presumably will continue to be so for the forseeable future. Two recent releases make fine additions to the group’s considerable discography (all the more impressive given that the earliest one appeared in 2004), the first, Panoramic Dreams Bathed In Seldomness, a CD issued on the French label Basses Frequences and the other, Dwell In Possibility, a twelve-inch vinyl outing on the UK imprint Blackest Rainbow.

Recorded at home during May 2008, Dwell In Possibility credits Danielle with voice, cello, violin, piano, ocarina, field recordings, rocks, processing, and mini-cassette and Wil with piano, whistles, toy organ, mixing board, processing, and cassette tapes. As expected, however, most of those individual sounds lose their identifying character once spread across the disc’s two sides. The first of the album’s track titles, “I’ve Thought Only of Empty Shadows,” speaks to some degree for the whole as Dwell In Possibility is very much a recording of shadows and transluscence. The material seems to inhabit some distant, ethereal sphere that constantly threatens to fade from view. During the first side’s twenty minutes, an undercurrent of industrial groans and bass-thudding rumble threads itself through ambient vapours until the peaceful resound of soft organ tones brings the material into the light. Though the album does display fifteen track titles (signature Celer titles such as “Empty Streets of Accurate Reasons” and “Trespassing In Love’s Furrows”), the sides unfold as uninterrupted streams. If anything, side two seems even more spectral, with tones stretching out languorously and notions of natural time suspended. Strains of melancholy and sadness always permeate Celer’s work and Dwell In Possibility is no exception, an impression exacerbated by the titles “Embark, Hollow Heart” and especially “Say a Prayer For Me Tonight.”

Recorded in 2006-07, Panoramic Dreams Bathed In Seldomness is, we’re told, fifty-seven minutes of “vintage, elliptical love songs” created from “crudely recorded tape, primitive synthesizers, detuned strings, untrained traditional instruments, and captured urban decay.” Of course anyone familiar with the group’s work knows that a Celer love song will be anything but a standard three-minute vocal piece and, sure enough, the album’s four pieces are prototypical Celer: poetically titled short films for the ears and mind whose mini-episodes meld into one another to form seductive and immersive collages. In the opening “Anticline Rests; Inertia Brace Yourself,” hazy field recording flurries bleed into becalmed wisps of reverb-drenched ambient tones and starbursts that hang suspendedly in mid-air, after which haunting string tones subsequently drift through heavy fog. Assorted murmurings and meandering organ tones lend “Collections of Fogs and Ladling Clarities” a ghostly character, while the repeated swoop of plangent strings during the entrancing “Who Feels Like Me, Who Wants Like Me, Who Doubts Any Good Will Come of This” gives it the feel of a lamentation. At album’s end, loops shimmer and swirl mesmerically for nineteen minutes during “How Dear This Ear of Reason, Beneath the Backlit Sun.” The last two settings in particular make the Basses Frequences release essential listening for Celer devotees.

September 2010

http://www.textura.org/reviews/celer_panoramicdreams_dwell.htm