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

Late one evening, about two weeks ago, i & the Beloved found ourselves high on a hillside in Cornwall • The wild moorland in this far southwest corner of England is characterised by precisely two things: vast granite slabs that put the ‘rude’ into protrude, & even bigger stone mines & chimneys, their ruins peppering the landscape with almost amusing prevalence • Caught between the twin immensities of nature & industry, it’s a beautiful, evocative place, & as we explored one particular ruin (behold), the day literally began to die around us • Across on the west side of the valley, the sun began to set, becoming a fiery bronze circle in the sky • From the time it first touched the fringes of the hilled horizon to finally being absorbed within it can only have been a few minutes, but the magic of the moment made it impossibly longer, stretching each second in order that our senses might be able to savour their passing •

Upon my return home, Celer’s latest release, Dying Star, was waiting for me, the listening experience of which takes me straight back to that Cornish hillside • It’s not just the title, or even the overt sunset shown on the cover; this is emphatically evening music, perfectly capturing the sense of things passing, closing, readying themselves for sleep • Appropriately, Will & Dani’s drones are more reserved than usual, kept at a distance by their unwavering calm & dynamic softness (Will recommends listening with the volume at 80%; do it, it works perfectly) • This aspect especially—the resolve to keep the material a hovering mezzo-piano throughout—is bold & impressive (i’m reminded of advice given to me many years ago: if you really want to get an audience’s attention, play increasingly quietly; loud music can be—& is—more doggedly ignored); there’s ever the sense that, at any moment, the music might just pass away completely, which makes the minutes we are given—&, generously, Celer give us nearly 50 of them—all the more tantalising & significant (track title “I could almost disperse” says it all) • & that is what continues to be most remarkable thing about Celer’s œuvre: the astonishing way that such radically pared-down material is nonetheless so miraculously full of life & energy, so emotional & allusive • The more one listens to their drones, the less they sound like such, seemingly filled to bursting with ebb & flow, gentle eddies & currents worrying the material at some fathomless depth; from this perspective, moments of slight but noticeable change—such as the exquisite opening of the fourth track, “On the Edges of Each Season”, with its insistent growing cluster & deep, only half-perceptible rumbling bass—become almost shockingly novel •

Dying Star simply isn’t just another Celer release; its quietly massive majesty betrays incredibly deft artistry & bespeaks a profound creative maturity • This album may just be Celer’s masterpiece •

5:4 rating: 5/5

http://5-against-4.blogspot.com/2010/08/quietly-massive-majesty-celer-dying.html

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of reviewing a reissue of Celer’s ‘Engaged Touches’ on Home Normal – that album was, for me, something of a revelation as I had never before heard their work and was astonished by its sheer elegant beauty…

I was, then, thrilled to have before me a new album to review – ‘Dying Star’ on Dragon’s Eye Recordings.

From the outset, it’s clear that ‘Dying Star’ is an entirely different approach to ambient music than that found on ‘Engaged Touches’. The sonic palette is reduced to the most minimal of elements – a single vintage synthesiser and mixing board (so the accompanying notes tell me). Gone too is the epic musicality of ‘Engaged Touches’- which was reminiscent of Stars of the Lid’s best work- and in its place are washes of vague and almost illusory ambience – undefined and restless, creating a forever morphing, ebbing and fading field of sound.

Owing to the structural and sonic similarity of the tracks, ‘Dying Star’ creates the impression of being a single piece of music rather than an album composed of individual tracks. The album flows, one piece into the next with indistinguishable beginnings and endings, feeling like an intentional aural modelling of the imperceptible liminal boundary of night and day alluded to
in the album’s title. The results are, needless to say, mesmerising and haunting.

The apparent simplicity of the music should not be confused with a poverty of ideas, nor should it be assumed that such sparse arrangements betray a lack of musical nous. Celer have proved, over their extensive discography, that they have a rich and certain grasp of the conceptual terrain of ambient music and have explored every inch of it. ‘Dying Star’ should be taken as
but one exploratory emission from within their oeuvre rather than a definitive statement of intent.

To my mind the album isn’t as strong as some of their other output, but I feel that, somehow, “strength” isn’t what is intended to be conveyed here. The hazy ganzfeld-like experimentation delivered through the album’s eight tracks is to be consumed almost incidentally as a subtle augmentation of naturally occurring waking dreams. This is true ambient music – to be enjoyed as an integrated part of the surroundings rather than attended to with focussed intent – and in this context, you couldn’t ask for a better example of the art.

– Review by John McCaffrey for Fluid Radio

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2010/08/celer-dying-star-2/

Even though I don’t dare to locate this precious 3” CDr within the recent string of posthumous Celer releases, what I can do is point out how great it is. The title track, obviously the only one here, stretches the format’s limits to the max, clocking in at just under 23 minutes. I’m not usually one for shimmering, ambient drones(capes) but this husband-and-wife duo really did it right. Using a variety of string instruments with tape sound, samples and field recordings, “All At Once Is What Eternity Is” transports the listener over bizarre glaciers of rugged landscapes before, after some 13 minutes, a sudden break washes over the composition like sudden rain. Some spoken word samples ensue before the track builds again, via floating female melodies, towards a blissful anti-climax. It is an absorbing, elevating listening experience, and as such might be discarded as somewhat high-strung by some or in some situations. But while this certainly is not a release for each and every situation, it is so emotional that it is practically beyond reach. “All At Once Is What Eternity Is” has been out for a few months but it is still available from the label.

8/10 — Jan-Arne Sohns (1 September, 2010)

http://www.foxydigitalis.com/foxyd/reviews.php?which=5892

Opening in medias res with field recordings that slowly shift into a haze of hovering tones, Will and Dani’s loop-based constructions flicker and unfurl at an unhurried pace, ebbing into one another, decaying into resonant silence. Indeed, Panoramic Dreams… proves to be an apt title for this collection, as each track enacts a sort of bleary-eyed navigation of an imagined landscape. There is a profound sense of melancholy in these recordings, but also a subjunctive quality that is hard to ignore – a meditation on possibility, on what might come to pass. Like the best Celer recordings, the four tracks collected here evoke in this listener a sense oflonging and nostalgia, the object of which remains opaque and elusive, but ultimately no less affecting. –Alex Cobb

While Celer always includes fastidious notes about what has gone into a recording, not least where its beloved field recordings have been gathered, rarely does the duo set out to essay its own semi-realistic version of something specific.

This album, its first on the new Norwegian label Soundscaping Records, is an exception – its title is Pockets of Wheat, on its cover is a picture of wheat bending to the breeze, and the duo´s expressed intent is to mimic the sway of a wheatfield discovered during a stopover in northern Texas.

Always sensitive to the small details of whatever comes its way, the couple became enchanted with the unrelenting song of the vast fields, the tones made by the wind catching the stalks and husks, and the constantly-changing melody of that song.

As usual, Celer muster a large array of instruments and equipment, from cello and piano to recordings of the wind itself, painstakingly creating some one hundred five- to ten-second tape loops which were played back and selected at random. The pair certainly achieve what they set out to do, imitate the drone of the wheatfield. The standing wheat is the constant, like the body of a cello, while the wind is the bow which plays its strands. The music it makes depends literally upon which way the wind blows.

The recording has a slightly atonal chord running through it as leitmotif. In their notes, the duo have excerpted a lengthy quote from a story by Algernon Blackwood, an author famous for imbuing nature with gothic menace. That tone is indeed dark and unsettling. In due time, you become accustomed to it, though, and as it waxes and wanes, you hear how just beyond, texture and colour are in constant flux. In fact, as more time passes, and the “wind” continues unabated, you note that some dramatic changes have occured.

A gorgeous touch indicative of the attention to detail Celer put into its work is the actual wind which can only be discerned when the music goes almost silent for a second or two.

– Stephen Fruitman

http://sonomu.net/text/~celer-pockets-of/

Diese Improvisation auf Analogsynthesizer entstand im Herbst 2008, ein knappes Jahr, bevor mit Danielle Baquet-Long die weibliche Hälfte von Celer jung gestorben ist. Will Long hält die Erinnerung an die wenigen gemeinsamen Jahre wach mit einer Musik, die sich ganz dem Moment und der Intuition hingibt. Der im nach Innen lauschenden Miteinander entstandene Dreamscape verbreitet vor diesem Hintergrund ein besonderes intensives Gefühl von Vergänglichkeit und Sonnenuntergang. Gedämpfter geht es kaum. Man soll mit Kopfhörer ebenfalls nach Innen lauschen. Was da summt, ist kaum mehr als ein Hauch, der leise und leicht die Befindlichkeit tönt und trübt. Die wenigen Modulationen in pianissimo und piano sind dröhnminimalistischer, diskreter und ereignisloser als alles, was Brian Eno je geschaffen hat, nur ein geisterhafter Schatten selbst des besonders ruhigen Thursday Afternoon. Die Hör- und zugleich Selbsterfahrung ließe sich nur noch durch Floating in einem Iso-Tank überbieten. Die hauchzarten Schwebwellen geben einem wahrhaftig ‚The Feeling Of Trancing Through A Silent Expanse‘, eine geisterhafte Körperlosigkeit, die es erlaubt, sich molekular mit allem zu mischen: ‚I Could Almost Disperse‘. [BA 67 rbd]

http://www.badalchemy.de/

It seems all too ordinary at first: an organic drone fading in and gently rising and falling over the course of several minutes. But then something changes, not in the music but in the listeners. Perhaps a period of tuning in is required; perhaps the music is simply too powerful to ignore. Eventually one succumbs to its spell. It is possible to find oneself drifting off and away from it, only to be gradually, gently, drawn back into the intimate drone.

Dying Star, recorded in 2008, is the result of an improvisation on a vintage analogue synth. The title and the cover artwork refer to the setting of the sun, although it could be the sun itself which is a slowly dying star. (Don’t worry, we still have a few million years before we need to get concerned.) The very mention of dying gives the record a further dimension, whether intentional or not, as Celer ended with the tragic early death of Danielle Baquet-Long last year. Her husband and musical partner Will Long is overseeing a lengthy release schedule of recordings by the duo, although it is doubtful all of them would have seen the light of day had Danielle not passed away; they would still be making new music together, making some of it available and stock-piling tapes not deemed ready for release. But this is not to be, and we must celebrate her life through the work rather than reflect on what might have been.

The album gradually unveils its magic; not much changes throughout the duration, even in comparison to other works in the Celer discography. The drone – a sort of luminescent, orangey hum – rises and falls across a few tones in pieces of varying length. Whether a track is three minutes or 11 does not really make any difference. One feels as if any of the pieces could stretch out to infinity, providing a protective cushion against the outside world. It is a work that could settle into the background but every so often, in different places at different times, there is a moment that reaches out and grabs the ears.

This is a breathtakingly beautiful work, and perhaps it is reading too much of the duo’s biography to describe as at times almost overwhelmingly sad. However, this is the listener’s influence on the music, in much the same way that rock fans begin re-interpreting the lyrics of a Buckley or a Morrison because of their early deaths; surely the mystery is hidden in their work somewhere? Well, sorry, but no. Celer did not make this album with any thought of the future, or of dying – they were a young couple, newly married and in love and to impose anything deeper on the album is unnecessary, because this is an album that transcends any outside influence and just is. As the album fades out to silence (the closing track is much quieter than what has preceded it), one is warmed by the fuzzy glow it leaves and grateful to those who made it.

-Jeremy Bye

http://thesilentballet.com/dnn/Home/tabid/36/ctl/Details/mid/384/ItemID/3592/Default.aspx

Dani and Will have blessed us with so, so many wonderful gifts ever since the birth of their musical partnership. The wonderful thing is that all of those gifts are being unwrapped and brought out for us to play with all the time. It almost seems like most of Celer’s work is being brought to light only now, after Dani’s untimely and tragic passing. Her contributions will always and forever be missed and celebrated by all. “Panoramic Dreams Bathed in Seldomness” is just the latest of their lasting legacy to be released. It is a four-track collection, each lasting between 12 and 20 minutes.

As is the case with every release I’ve heard from this exceptional duo, this is pure ambient magic. These compositions are heavenly. They put you in a good spot, a comfortable state-of-mind, and keep you there. So serene, so relaxing, so calming. Audible peace. I’ll be honest, I’ve had a few nights of insomnia over the past year and I’ve always reached for a Celer disc. It just takes you somewhere more pleasant. It feels like a consoling presence grips you by the hand and invites you to fly away to a better place. That is, a place far away from your anxieties, your unfulfilled wishes, your whatever. Each ambient loop is a mantra that reassures you that everything’s alright. No more pain, no more distress, no more loss. It’s safe here in these tracks.

I think I’ll stay. 9/10 — Dave Miller (25 August, 2010)

http://www.foxydigitalis.com/foxyd/reviews.php?which=5863