I almost missed them entirely, but something appeared on my screen in late January, and within 5 minutes I was transported to a perfect sunny day, in the middle of a gently rolling sea, on a reach in a sailboat, and to a sonic warmth that dissolved the doldrums of my winter reality.  It was Diving Into The Plasma Pool, the latest (and I think last) of the five part Black Vinyl Series by Celer (Will Long).  For whatever reason, I missed parts 1 through 3, but as soon as I heard a sample from Resting On Intensity (Side A), I looked to see if there were other LPs still offered—and indeed, Part 4 was (and is) still available.  Part 4, An Immensity Merely To Save Lifestarts a bit darker with Of My Complaisance (Side A) and then softens with Gusts of Hysterical Petulance (Side B).

The subtle enmeshed loops of Diving Into The Plasma Pool flow like Debussy’s Nuages and yearn (although more gently) like Nicholas Szczepanik’s Please Stop Loving Me—they are waves that crest, hold onto a pleasurable edge and then dissolve.  The chords and sounds are right in my sweet-spot.  But enough from me; just listen—better yet, buy one or both of them.  They’re gorgeous, full and resonant—simply magical.

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To call Celer, the now one-man project of American sound and visual artist William Thomas Long, prolific would be an understatement of sorts. At the time of writing, the discography on his extremely professional-looking webpage (www.thesingularwe.org) contained no less than fifty-five label- and thirty-three self-released items. Considering the first of those came out a meagre eight years ago, we’re talking an average of almost one release a month. It’s simple, if sheer quantity had any intrinsic value in the realm of artistic expression, the 32-year old Mississippi native would be up there with the best.

‘Without Retrospect, the Morning’ is the third and final instalment in a water-themed trilogy which includes 2008’s ‘Cursory Asperses’ and 2009’s ‘In Escaping Lakes’ (both released on Japan’s Slow Flow Rec) and documents the time spent by William on a photographic and survey mission in South Alberta, Canada, back in the winter of 2009. Armed with two open reels and a box of old tape recordings, he set about cutting and pasting the material he had brought along, mixing it with field recordings of ice, snow and wind collected from his wintry abode. After lying around for a couple of years, the tapes were finally mastered in Tokyo, where William had in the meantime re-located, and released in December of last year by Italy’s Glacial Movements, home of all things cold and arctic, a natural choice indeed.

What firsts strikes the casual listener is how inexplicably low the album has been mixed, which renders it all but inaudible to those not equipped with a good pair of headphones. Granted, the crystalline nature and assumed fragility of its seven songs demand, command even, a certain level of refinement and delicateness but having to stretch one’s ears to actually hear the material is taking things a bit too literally. When, a couple of minutes into the record, sounds finally start to emerge from the mists of one’s subconscious and coalesce into intelligible patterns, they do so with ethereal parsimony, threatening to dissolve into aural nothingness at any given moment. Mostly based around little more than a tenuous string of mid-range frequencies and devoid of any real chromatic progression, they seem to simply float around without ever truly dropping anchor into one’s psyche.

If water is being evoked at all on this album, it is always in its frozen and vaporous guises. Listened to in the right frame of mind, ‘Without Retrospect, the Morning’ does a fine job at evoking the kind of pristine and hushed atmosphere which one equates with snow-covered expanses when the rays of the sun slowly begin to pierce through the milky veil of the morning fog. Forget the (admittedly gorgeous) cover art and liner notes for a moment, though, and you could easily come up with another ten or so equally valid explanations as to what the sounds – and I use the term loosely – mean to you. It is almost as if one’s imagination kept bouncing off patches of black ice while vainly attempting to make sense of what it (almost) hears.

For all its suggestive qualities, ‘Without Retrospect, the Morning’ more often than not comes across as being low-key and non-eventful for the sheer sake of it and one never gets the impression that the artist is actually trying to share something with them. Coming from someone who could listen to the whistle of a boiling teapot for hours on end, this is saying a lot. I am positive that William has a clear vision of what he is actually trying to achieve on an artistic level (the quality of his photography attests to it) but for fifty-two defiantly hermetic minutes, Celer’s opus feels like listening to someone talking to themselves. Which might work a treat in this increasingly voyeuristic society but left this reviewer untouched.

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One of Will Long’s most delightfully active releases to date, Epicentral Examples employs all manner of sound effects–cavernous reverb, rewinding tape, snippets of old-time film dialogue and natural field recordings–to adorn its otherwise typical glaciers of amorphous drone. Of course, where Celer is concerned, “otherwise typical” is still better than a lot of what we’re hearing from today’s ambient artists; even better is the loving care Long clearly puts into each new release, given the sheer number of them he puts out each month year. Epicentral Examples has enough yawning chasms to satisfy longtime fans, but it also features plenty of other elements which make it a great place to start for those new to Celer’s music.

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Although not as indiscriminate as is denoted by the term, I am often a completist when it comes to collecting the works of selected authors and musicians.  Yet, I would be hard-pressed, given his massive output of creative work, to even begin to collect all the music of Will Long in the guise of Celer.  By now, I probably have a dozen or so of Celer’s recordings, but if I had to recommend one and only one recent work, it might just be this almost mystical and entrancing album.   I’m also drawn to this release since it fulfills one of the most significant inspirations for why I listen to music—it takes me somewhere, and the images and sensations are vivid.

This is the third work in a trilogy based on water (to some, water symbolizes comfort and freedom).  The two previous albums are Cursory Asperses (2008) and Escaping Lakes (2009)—the former alluding to the slow movements of small streams and the latter to the calmer depths.  The music on this album being inspired in part by Will’s trip to southern Alberta in 2009 (documenting the wilderness in photographs for a local Park Service).

Without Retrospect, the Morning is different from the first two in the series in that it has distinct tracks (versus a continuous thread of sound) and it captures water (or the sense of it) in a different state—a chilled desolation, at times at the edge of an existence where the potential energy is stored and released ever so sparingly in a landscape yearning for Sun and warmth.  It’s therefore appropriate that this album landed at the Glacial Movements record label, a self-proclaimed “glacial and isolationist ambient” label.  I also appreciate that the recording has been mastered with a softness that retains the intricate clarity of the many layers of sound buried in the crystalline strata (to heck with the loudness wars!).  There are also hidden sonic depths, and some passages might be felt before they are heard (as in Dry and Disconsolate).

A lateral effect of this CD is that it triggers (for me) some pleasant, albeit quirky, sonic memories from long ago.  I’m a fan of the original 1960s Star Trek.  There was some great incidental music and ambient sounds used in that series that, to my ears, are recalled in a track like Distance and Mortality (see if you hear the resonance of the wind from the pilot episode, The Menagerie or the sound of the transporter beam).

So find a quiet room, bundle-up, get comfortable, and explore stunning breadth of this vast hyperborean landscape.  Just remember to turn the volume back down on your amplifier before you change the sources on your preamp or pop-in another CD.

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If names were reflective of personality traits, would the world be a better place? Shakespeare argued the idea, but it’d be nice to have some advanced warning system when dealing with a person or institution. It’s the beauty of Lightness and Irresponsibility, another posthumous beauty from Celer. It dares not tread in any territory not in line with the album’s on-point focus, two long-form meditations rarely raising their voice. There is no discipline or consequence to these compositions, just a life at its most carefree. As douchebag CEOs rig the stock market and two-faced politicians further divide America for ill-gotten gains, it’s comforting to forget the sadness surrounding Celer and focus on those lighthearted moments of youth. It’s not nostalgia but a moment in time frozen, forever providing the calm center we need in a world of mislabeled sycophants.

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Celer has always been an artist who can effortlessly dream up evocative drones and a deep-thought style of ambient introspection. Always refreshing, always vividly alive and constantly absorbing into the very atmosphere, Will Long’s music touches upon phantom shades and faint degrees, almost to the point of aural invisibility. Without Retrospect, the Morning, is no different than that of Long’s multiple releases, in that it is ambient music of the highest caliber, and yet it is a departure, for it contains his coldest music to date.

Created in 2009 while Long was working as a photographer in South Alberta, Canada, Without Retrospect, the Morning is cold to the touch, and just slightly under a sub zero temperature, but the diluted light saves it from becoming an icy tundra of drone. The early morning – late sunset sound was primarily recorded using two Sony Tapecorder open reels, an endless delay system and contact microphones, resulting in an unrivaled organic purity and depth. The weak light, and the quiet still of Winter, can be seen reflecting off sharp, crystal drones, as light as a white-whispered cloud sent up into the cold air, and Long’s stark crystals of ice are lightly glazed with a smooth flowing current of ambient air. “A Small Rush Into Exile” glows an almost eerie colour against the rising sun, silently transforming as strands of notes slowly rise up and over the crystal.

These drones are like shards of ice that have broken off and become displaced, removed from an original, wider structure. Will Long has been active enough for long enough to have perfected his source and his sound, and the inner musical momentum within the seven tracks is just right. The music almost seems to pour from concealed cracks in the ice, creeping out of the recording process in thin, cool channels that are able to warm their cold blood in the sun. Sub bass frequencies deepen the tone, as if pulled under a flurry of powdered, soft snow; this is the beautiful contrast, the deeper shell of clinking ice and the ethereal air above it. For the most part, the arrival of the bass is non-intrusive, instead of influencing the warmer air and dragging it downwards. The pure transparency of the drones offer plenty of temperate warmth and help to subdue any rough daggers of ice that may remain, glowing defiantly in dynamic swells in beautiful contours. Raise the atmosphere, if not the temperature, and this is due to the dimmed volume throughout the record, which only rises an inch above the white.

A gorgeous cover complements the clarity of the music – seeing the cover art is enough to produce shivers down the spine. Long’s restrained technique helps to focus in on the miniscule, where the true alterations occur; it is inside the tone, and its constant change, that really separates ambient musicians, and turns the music into a true art-form. These seven pieces don’t stray far from their source – there isn’t enough energy inside – yet they are always allowed the capacity to evolve at their own pace if they should wish to do so. The music is without a companion; the only survivor amid a solitary stretch of snow and ice, awakening to the fragile light of dawn.

Finally, “With Some Effort, the Sunset” emerges, shining above all of the previous six tracks, as vapour rises and the light descends. A lower frequency is more prominent, perhaps as the force of the sunset, quietly cooling and returning to what has been, fading for another day.

Celer’s music is in plentiful suppy, but ambience as smooth and as thoughtful as this is very difficult to find. One it is found, it’s a sound we should treasure, and it ensures that Without Retrospect, the Morning is a stand-out release in an amazing discography. A shushed drift, the drone is only a thin slice of ice, lit by the morning, cool in her departure and born again on her rising.

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