Celer’s torrent of releases seems to have slowed to a trickle of late, but it’s no surprise to see Will Long back on my review pile this week with another newie. This is one of two CDs out this week on Spekk which come in beautiful book-like oversized card sleeves. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the disc itself contains beautiful understated ambient drones.

There’s only one track on here, but it’s long and it’s droney, full of subtle deep space synthesis and that drifts forward on shuddering modulated chords. It’s airy and minimal but also a little dark and unsettling, with occasional distant disembodied voices and subtly discordant swells of half-melody. It unfolds gradually into a mournful rhythmic quiver that drones on for a very long time. If you like drones, and you like Celer, you’ll probably find it very enjoyable.

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The second release is from the increasingly less prolific Celer is the single piece Zigzag that has a different, developed approach to Will Long’s penchant for ambient space.  The most overt difference that is immediately noticeable is that rather than expansive drones, he instead works in the context of a rhythmic bounce dynamic, leading me to believe that the title could possibly be a reference to the waveform view of the piece or the amplification used in the final mix.

Beyond that, the other striking difference is a heavier use of layering and differing tones and textures throughout the 48 minute duration.  The shifting tonal qualities and rhythmic feel adds to this, and even though the dynamics keep things pretty quiet, it never drifts off into the background like similarly sparse, minimalist recordings often do.

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The work of Will and Dani Long continues to stretch its willowed fingers into the next frontier, this time courtesy of Berlin-based Humming Conch. And much like the label from wince it came, Voyeur is an intimately aural affair that benefits from cusping the stereo speaker up against the ear and listening at a hushed volume. It whispers of airy waves and whistling breezes; the noise of silence. There are crests, as if playing with the proximity of the shell to the ear canal. This is a marriage of sheer perfection – an album that captures the beauty of every day, the electronic elegance of Berlin, and worldly melodies. And when I must dust the sand out of my pants after each listen, Voyeur proves an oasis in the middle of suburbia needed in times such as ours. I scavenge shells in its absence in hopes of recreating its real world symphonics. Alas, it cannot top this…

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Celer‘s paced but prolific stream of drone music has been a consistence source of elegant and elegiac melancholia since the project’s inception in 2005. Nearly a decade later, the Tokyo-based project now helmed solely by Will Long continues its run of distant yet personal tone music while adding an element of rhythm to the mix, a surprisingly risky change to a seemingly perfected formula. While seeing the word “rhythm” associated with Celer might be a shock, this is more of a tidal rhythm played with a minimalist’s hand. As Long explains, quite simply, “Several years ago while living in the United States, I became interested in the minimalist music of the 1960′s and 1970′s, and new wave of the early 1980′s, with the steady pulses, the constant harmonies, and endless continuity.”

Long’s resulting experiment is a dynamic piece of drone music that somehow heightens the forlorn movements while simultaneously keeping the frigidly static scenery we’ve come to expect (and personally, demand) from Celer. Although the “digest” version available is less than two-minutes long, the tones capture the depth and creaking beauty of the full, 49-minute piece.

But there’s also a more personal element at play. After much delay, Zigzag‘s fruition coincided with Long hearing his first child’s heartbeat via ultrasound, and everything fell into place. As Long explains, “It seemed like such a fateful connection between the baby and the music. When new life begins, everything points toward the future.” Preorder Zigzag (out 3/5/14) via Spekk’s Bandcamp as soon as you can. First orders come with a free limited edition, handmade packaged bonus album that’s available only when getting the CD.

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An interesting backstory attends Celer’s latest release Voyeur, and it’s one that brings into clearer focus the at times foreboding ambiance of the album content. Apparently a few years ago Will Long was commissioned by a California-based film company to produce a score for a film inspired by Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window, a key difference being that the projected film would include a two-sided viewer plot as opposed to the one in Hitchcock’s that centers on the perspective of the temporarily wheelchair-bound photographer L.B. Jefferies (played by Jimmy Stewart). Long created the material prior to the commencement of filming at home and at a studio in Silverlake, California, only to be told that the entire film project had been cancelled—despite the fact that the musical material had been completed a week before the first draft deadline.

That’s not all that’s curious about the release, which Berlin-based Humming Conch has issued in a run of 300 vinyl copies. Though the recording was made in March of 2008, it’s only now seeing the light of day as a soundtrack to a film never made. And unlike many a Celer release where one encounters long-form pieces of twenty-minute durations, Voyeur sequences eleven tracks into a thirty-four-minute presentation—though such an approach is consistent with soundtracks in general, where short musical pieces typically are composed with specific scenes in mind. Another interesting thing about the release is that Danielle Baquet-Long, Will’s late partner, is credited with vocals, but one must listen carefully to hear them as they’ve been incorporated into the opening and closing tracks as barely audible choral breaths.

Curious details aside, Voyeur is quintessential Celer in its skeletal drift of fragile, shimmering vapours and whistling, organ-like tones. But as mentioned, Voyeur also parts company with Celer music as it’s often presented, specifically in settings such as “Bitter Light and Anticipating a Day Heat (The Isolated)” and “Binoculars, a Telephone, and Fear (The Note)” where dissonance and darker tonalities emerge to lend the material a haunted and unsettled quality. In such moments, one imagines Voyeur could just as easily function as a modern-day soundtrack to Hitchcock’s Vertigo or (in its non-violent episodes, at least) Psycho as much as Rear Window. The inclusion of these darker passages also adds to the release in providing contrast to episodes like “Intermission (Afternoon, Don’t End)” and “Finale (After Midnight)” that are comparatively serene in character. Relatedly, Voyeur also suggests that film producers would be wise to consider Celer for future soundtrack commissions; it’s hard to think of any musical act more naturally capable of creating soundtrack material that’s suitably atmospheric and evocative without being overly intrusive.

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Will Long came out with over a dozen new releases this year under his Celer project, in keeping with his consistently stupefying output.

Celer has, for a while now, been my favorite modern ambient. I mentioned in my review of Eluvium’s Nightmare Ending that Eluvium evokes a feeling in me very specific to the ambience of the Pacific Northwest. Celer and Chubby Wolf, on the other hand (especially on great releases like Menggayakan, The Low, the Sows, and Discourses of the Withered) often evoke a sense of wonder at the world, the traveler’s sense of awe and gratitude. It is fitting, since after all both Danielle Baquet-Long (who unfortunately passed away a few years ago, if you don’t know the story)  and Will Long were something of a pair of nomadic artist-academicians, to my understanding.

According to Long’s bandcamp, Weak Ends was influenced by a trip to Okinawa last summer. The work is a single lulling loop that repeats for about 30 minutes (not too long, not too short) with little variation. Warm sheets of synthesizers bring a tranquil scene of an afternoon on a Japanese beach to life. It is a fine ambient release that has earned a respectable place in the Celer discography and is no doubt one of the best Celer releases this year. Put it on when you’re doing dishes, trying to fall asleep, meditating, whatever you like– this is great ambient.

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The 2013 Yule soundtrack in the house has been four tracks of warmly soothing, nearly motionless soundscapes, somehow circumscribed by two contrasting descriptions of flight condition in the record’s presentation. One is by Will Long himself; the other (dated 1960) by an older namesake, perhaps a relative, but we’re not sure. Both are characterized by highlighting the immenseness of what was being seen by the writers outside the aircraft. All of the above, executed and/or penned by someone else, might have risked sounding like some kind of ethereal cliché. Not when Celer is involved, though: the improbably productive current Tokyo resident (who, incidentally, is soon becoming a dad – best wishes!) has a real knack for lubricating the internal mechanics of an absorptive “evolved ambient” buff with extremely attenuated tones inside processes of minute-gradation changes. The relatively uncomplicated evolution of the whole is largely grounded, or “clouded” shall we say, on low-keyed washes of rather snug reiterative sequences disclosing beautiful tenuous tints, now and again reinforced by stronger components which – on a close inspection and by raising the volume – caused the looser ends of my room to tremble. This notwithstanding, the most important aspect lies in the soporifically rewarding “presence/absence” of this particular record, a nerve-numbing acoustic treat for meditative, or merely absent-minded settings. Climbing Formation may constitute an ideal choice for underscoring the unequivocal vaporization of the festive scents we used to experience as children and right after, nowadays entirely gone in soulless unconcern. And – what’s even badder – without an inch of yearning on this side.

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Without Retrospect, The Morning is Celer aka Will Long’s snow-covered and glacier-depicting audio shard on Alessandro Tedeschi’s Glacial Movements label, released in December 2012 and available to purchase and stream at Bandcamp. The label is an astute place for Long’s seven synth- and organ-driven Ambient tracks, the front artwork does live up to the selected material. And this time, the concept of selection and singling material out in order to form a cohesive work is much more meaningful than expected, as the album is recorded over the course of two years, from 2009–2011, and in four different locations, crossing borders of seasons, states, countries and oceans. Such a strategy contains certain risks: how can a wintry grace or icy isolation be properly constructed if the material is created in-between different projects and work phases, revisited only arbitrarily without the focus of a definite goal which is eventually called Without Retrospect, The Morning much later? Turns out that this album is – bar one exception – terrifically coherent, concentrated and a true-bred addition to the Glacial Movements catalog. Celer’s impression of winter does match the listener’s expectancy via frosty synth funnels and snow-covered sylvan organ washes, but these are only textures. The timbre, meanwhile, is twofold, comprising yearning undertones and moments of utter loneliness. Without Retrospect, The Morning sparkles nonetheless, as if it wanted to turn around the influence of its droning molecules and stretched vesicles. It therefore offers a great opportunity to be reviewed in-depth as part of my Winter Ambient Review Cycle 2013. And this opportunity turned into reality.

Cautious brightness, vestibules to sun-dappled times, a glazed moiré as implied by the softened sine overtones that are equipollent parts of the light blue organ fluxion: Holdings Of Electronic Lifts is a beautiful Ambient vignette of three and a half minutes, eminently bright yet archetypically Celer-like. It contains a distant New Age tonality, but the synths – or processed stringed instruments – are emaciated, purposely desiccate in order to showcase the hibernal tendency depicted in both the front artwork as well as the overall aesthetic topic of the Glacial Movements label. Meanwhile, one of the most interesting synergies is presented in A Small Rush Into Exile in which Will Long presents both a self-imposed forsakenness and the resulting elation that comes with it. Therefore, it so happens that a haunting mélange of eldritch-elasticized icicle complexions (complete with dissonant sinews) clashes with poignantly fragile segues of euphony and contentment. In the end though, this titular small rush is carved out well, unleashing a stern moment of isolation in a dark cavity.

Said dark cavity is ostracized in the following composition which turns into a crystal antrum. The title Dry And Disconsolate may hint at a diametrically opposite mood range, but the resulting piece of over ten minutes not only is a glacial and moist one, but also resting peacefully in itself. This tranquil peace, notwithstanding the soothing opening phase, is not a given. Helical polar beams pierce through a wraithlike – and comparably wadded – synth fluxion whose whitewashed, silky gentleness even reduces the recurrent tension and pressure that is spawned by the simultaneity of the undulating layers. Said tension is further augmented by an oscillating low frequency undercurrent which adds an aerose gravitas to the argentine loftiness. Dry And Disconsolate turns out to be one of the fully fleshed out tracks. It is even enthralling, but the stringency of the seemingly incompatible and fighting forces or timbres makes it a paradoxical hybrid of portent awash with light. On Variorum Of Hierophany, Celer fathoms another dichotomy in one of his iciest tracks: a warbled and strongly intrinsic aeriform ice floe towers above an ethereal river of Detroit-compatible luminosity. Fir-green, strangely thermal and therefore unexpectedly warm, its amicability is severely perturbed by the flying sine siren. Both layers are disconnected, yet cross-pollute their respective presence.

A Landscape Once Uniformly White follows, a strikingly peaceful track with no antagonistic antipodes or antimatter sewn into its plateau. This is the Drone track of the album, and although Will Long is not particularly fond of this overused genre depiction, this vitreous artifact is certainly droning, but benignantly so. In lieu of incisive sine strings, mellow rivulets and billows are floating through a particularly dark and quiescent backdrop of blackness. A Landscape Once Uniformly White breathes and exhales tranquility and slivers of enigmatic wonders. It lives up to the wintry theme and rewards listeners who turn up the volume; since there is no bass aorta traversing by, the pristine purity of the synth formations can freely expand and emit the microtonal granularity and different shades of the surfaces. What is amiss here is then moulded into Distance And Mortality, a downright pompous arrangement of rubicund strata. Heavily wafting bass protrusions cause a mephitic air, polyhedron beams mercilessly illuminate the scenery with their oppulent incandescence. I am tempted to guess that this piece comes from a completely different recording session. Previously, cacophony and dissonances were easy to digest, as the partaking elements were whimsical, lightweight and frosty, but the sheer strength and power of the organs triples the tension. An almost histrionic addition, with its dimension emphasized via the exclamation mark at the end of this very sentence! The long-form finale With Some Effort, The Sunset pays homage to the album title both grammatically and semantically and ends the album with a wonderfully somnolent, carefully balanced blending of iridescently plinking fractals, silver streams of wondrousness and purity as well as hidden but detectable traces of harmony and glee. While not being joyous per se, this last illuminant enshrines a certain joy in-between the cold coating of ice shards, frost and crushed snow.

It could be the case that Without Retrospect, The Morning was never meant to be released in this particular form and with Alessandro Tedeschi’s Glacial Movements label in mind. There are certain hints sewn outside the music-related boundaries. Firstly, and as mentioned in the first paragraph, the recording timeframe spans about two years, from 2009–2011, with all their springs and summers and whatnots. Secondly, the tracks were created in four different locations – California, Mississippi, Alberta, and Tokyo –, with the last of them, as fans of Celer know, being the “interim-final” destination of Will Long’s restless voyages. These biographical and production-related facts neither spoil the album, nor are they detectable in the ambiance itself. Except for the comparably gargantuan Distance And Mortality, every vignette and 10+ minutes piece sports and emanates the same frosty color range and comprises of identical, therefore consistent textures and patterns. Will Long’s knowledge as a curator is as refined as his composing skills, and indeed, both of them are needed on this album… and grant its very existence. Despite the various periods, seasons and cities, the common denominator is the transformation of winter in all its glory into shimmering Ambient music. Cold and situated in sub-zero climes, yet never exclusively crestfallen or dark, Without Retrospect, The Morning is a glitzy work full of prolonged coruscations and a solemnity which exchanges glistening particles or other pointillistic devices for wave-like, serpentine spheres.

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