Apropos Tiefgang und Zurückhaltung: Es gibt endlich wieder eine neue LP von Celer, die als physischer Tonträger veröffentlicht wird. Being Below (Two Acorns, 15. Februar) dürfte zu den knappsten und konzentriertesten Arbeiten Will Longs der vergangenen fünf oder zehn Jahre gehören. Als musikalisches Äquivalent zum Aus-dem-Fenster-in-den-Himmel-schauen ist es wie immer perfekt. Wir dürfen verfolgen, wie Wolken warmen Wohlklangs entstehen und vergehen, kondensieren und wieder zerstieben.

La pandemia non ha isciso sullo quantita di dischi pubblicata ogni anno da Will Long. Al contrario il 2020 e stato uno degli anni piu prolifici per il musicsta americano residente in Giappone. Appena dopo due settimane nel nuovo anno Celer ha reso disponibile sulla propria pagina di Bandcamp un mini album di ambient stellare, Being Below: sei brani che si susseguono senza soluzione di continuita creando un suono in cui immergersi tutta la notte.

Celer’s ‘Being Below’ is temporary music, fluttering by and passing beyond in an instant. Before you know it, the record is done, its transient nature on full display. The record is as much a reflection as it is a musical entry. Will Long ruminates on memory, the false confidence that one can feel, thinking that there’ll always be enough time, but then suddenly realising that things are coming to an end; the sand in the hourglass is running on empty.

Contained within are slim, instrumental songs which feel thin enough to potentially evaporate at any given moment, all coloured in the deep blue of a cloudless Summer sky, their textures a vital part of the stratosphere. ‘The Absence of Atmosphere’ lives in a quiet space, up in the sky above. But Being Below is as much about looking back as it is about looking up and beyond, giving its blue a pale and slightly melancholic tint – it’s there, somewhere, but it never really materialises.

Celer’s personal music is also an aural love letter. Romanticised tones with soft curls and slowly-morphing segues always ensure that the atmosphere shifts as and when it feels the need to; nothing is forced or pre-planned. The only structure within Being Below aims to reflect shifting states, ‘overlooking the past and future as a split pathway with the present endlessly fluctuating between’. Celer calls the process ‘an exercise in loop-less writing’, and it has given the music wider wings. The music gleams with prism-colours, radiating light. Celer is in a reflective mood; the songs seem to think on things, chewing the fat, before leaving things as they are. That isn’t to say that this record isn’t without emotion, because it is, and it’s one of Celer’s strengths. His tones are instantly identifiable, and emotions pour out with every ambient swell.

Being Below is a form of cloud-gazing, appearing, floating, dissolving, the endless, soaring blue sinking into the body. Using digital and analogue means, Will Long is able to create a thin, flexible and glowing aura of sound. It’s the perfect length, because, although short, its beauty lies in its ephemerality.

Dopo i quattro CD di un anno fa, Future Predictions, Will Long torna sotto l’alias Celer per un mini album di canzoni molto brevi in cui cerca – parole della nota stampa – alternative alla musica basata sui loop.

Registrato nel corso del 2020 utilizzando sia strumenti digitali, sia strumenti analogici, Being Below, “riflette stati mutevoli, che vanno oltre l’idea di passato e futuro come un percorso separato rispetto a un presente che fluttua senza fine tra i due”. Attorno, la stessa squadra di un anno fa: al mastering Stephan Mathieu, mentre il design è firmato Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek.

Mitte Februar bringen Two Acrons und Past Inside the Present die neue EP “Being Below” von Celer heraus. Die sechs eher kurzen Ambient-Tracks entstanden auf der Basis digitaler und analoger Instrumentierung und sind in ihrer tagträumerischen Atmosphäre von einer stets veränderlichen Struktur. Neben der auf je 150 transparente und schwarze Scheiben limitierten Vinyl-Edition ist die EP als CD und digital erhältlich.

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.

Ever resourceful, Will Long continues to find ways to spin fresh variations on Celer-related themes. Never one to to shy away from large-scale projects, his latest is no less than a four-CD set snugly housed within a lovely, custom-made clamshell box and accompanied by a sixteen-page booklet. Each disc contains a single piece, the shortest twenty-eight minutes, the longest forty-three, and each setting’s accompanied by travel photos and text. The work is thematically oriented towards the future—“a meditation on future events,” in his words—in contrast to 2018’s Memory Repetitions, which contended with memory and one’s interpretations of them over time.

The sound of the material on Future Predictions is quintessential Celer, as is its tone. Serene in mood and soothing in effect, each tape loop-based piece undulates gently without pause. The material, recorded with reel-to-reel tape, envelops the listener with warm, softly wavering tones and is thoroughly capable of inducing in the receptive listener an entranced state for the full measure of its 138 minutes. Though Long generated the material using digital and acoustic instruments, field recordings, and foley sounds, the music typically presents itself as a uniform, drifting sound wash free of individuating details. In being reduced to its most minimal form, the tranquil meditations are Celer at its purest. That’s especially the case, too, when the settings largely eschew dynamic contrast and narrative development—deliberately done by Long to sustain the work’s state—for repetitive flow. Whereas some ambient artists add and subtract elements as a work advances, the four on Future Predictions start with all layers playing and continue without deviation thereafter.

As abstract and minimal as the material is, it’s not without an emotional dimension. A wistful tone emanates from the music’s carefully sustained flow to lend the material a sad, even poignant quality. In being presented so abstractly, it becomes a Rorschach capable of accommodating any number of associations or impressions the listener brings to it. At the same time, the inclusion of text and photos points the listener in specific directions and encourages particular associations to emerge. With each musical setting, for example, conjoined to landscape photos in the booklet, the images naturally colour the musical reception to some degree.

The text presents a travel journal of sorts that, in contrast to the album title, is very much focused on concrete phenomena. Tenses shift, with the narrator fluctuating between past and future, from memories (“We rode through the ridgeways, up the winding mountain crests, around and over the peaks, and looked with wonder below.”) to melancholy musings on time’s merciless advance (“Back in our house, you’re years older and all grown up, and my hair is more grey.”) A sense of loss pervades the text (“I can see us talking, but I can’t hear our words.”), the sense of something precious now forever out of reach.

While the four settings share fundamental properties, there are differences, even if subtle ones. As becalmed as the opening disc’s “Merita” is, for instance, the second’s “No Sleep In Medan” is even calmer, its drowsy character in diametric opposition to the track’s title. However simplistic in design a given piece might appear, there’s no denying the beauty of Long’s constructions. As the forty-plus minutes of “Nothing Will Change” stretch out, there’s opportunity aplenty to bask in the gentle oscillations of its tones, the elegant interwine of its patterns, and the soothing lull of its rhythmic flow. When those soft, flute-like pitches intone alongside shimmering washes, it’s hard to resist describing this particular collection of Celer music as celestial. As captivating is the closing disc, whose “Qaraoun” buoys the listener with an ascending melodic motif whose organ-like gleam proves all the more entrancing when it appears in one slow-motion wave after another. And, despite Long’s decision to downplay dynamic contrast, some degree of intensification does seem to emerge as “Qaraoun” progresses, due perhaps in part to the listener’s desire for that repeating figure to eventually achieve a state of resolution.

Celer’s second album, originally released on CDR in 2006, has been polished up, remastered and given a smart CD release here. His third album “Continents” is getting the same treatment next month. Being a fairly recent convert to Celer’s work, both releases were new to my ears.

“Scols” is the very definition of what I’d describe as Will Long’s distinctive ‘Celer sound’, a series of subtly changing, slow sonic waves, synthetic and multi-layered, outlining a rolling landscape that’s not as simple as it first sounds, and running at a slow space that strongly encourages slow breathing and relaxation, but without any of the glibness that sometimes accompanies ‘chill out’ music. Opening track “Archival footage of only the lost and forgotten” sets out the stall quite clearly.

There’s a brightness and optimism to be found in pieces like “The energy to be freed”, but there is a fair abundance of various shades of darkness offered up here too. “Without strings, fabric or glass” has a hollow, sinister feel to it. Electronic buzzing sounds sprinkled over “Municipally, I let it slip” make it more uncomfortable somehow too, while “Thoughts ultimately of consciousness” takes a slightly more aggressive approach, relatively speaking. This is sci-fi, in a way that’s not your typical full-on dystopia, but where something somewhere is clearly not right- but sonically you’re being encouraged not to worry about it.

With its organ-like tones, “Icicle sparrows of piano pitches” is the only piece that alludes even remotely to the unusual choice of cover artwork.

It’s a predictable Celer work in some ways, but fans who lap up the artist’s prolific output, but who weren’t able to catch this on its first release fourteen years ago, will definitely enjoy this disc fitting nicely into the collection.

La terza uscita dello statunitense musicista/fotografo/scrittore a Tokyo Will Long “Continents” (del 2006, originariamente un astuccio dipinto a mano in edizione limitata contenente un CDr, un mini Cdr, inserti fotografici e poetici) in versione remastered (Stephan Mathieu) + bonus track (circa un ventino di minuti in più rispetto all’originale).

Un lentissimo srotolamento di cangianti textures ambientali, pigre e rigogliose in formato doppio cd.

Ripetizioni cicliche per frasi minimali sul limite dove l’azzurro tramuta in verde, come un inceppo puntina Eno / Reich da hash, che ti schianta sul divano e procede imperturbabile per ore (quasi un paio).

Ovvio che nel fluttuar s’incontrino zone più contrastate, ma è un nulla.
Alluviale tracimazione controllata di riverberi e delays, il silenzio poco più avanti che attende (sopra, sotto, ovunque).

Originally released back in 2006 Scols was the second album from one-man US ambient project Celer- Will Long, who now resides in Japan. It’s a nine-track affair that brings together a selection of drone works that move between gloomy spectral to simmering bleak. Here on Long’s own label, Two Acorns is a recent reissue of the album featuring a  remastering by Stephan Mathieu- the reissue is available as either a CD or digital download- we’re reviewing the DL- so can’t comment on the CD’s packaging

I think I first became aware of Celer’s work ten or so years back, and have always enjoyed what I’d heard- I’d not heard the Scols release before, and I must say it’s a lot more overtly stark & forlorn compared to his later work- that utilized slightly brighter tones & field recording details. Most of the nine tracks here are based around repetitively tolling and droning loops, I guess you can hear some comparison to the likes of William Basinski and Star of Lids – but the tone is a lot more glum, troubled, and creepy.

Each of the albums nine tracks runs between six and twelve minutes- we open with one of the longer & somewhat more positive tracks on the release “ Archival footage of only the lost and forgotten” here we find a slowly circular sweep and glide of a simmer amassed string tone & a lightly warming warbling element- this felt like a more slowed & regal take on something you might have expected to hear on Stars Of The Lid’s 2001 album The Tired Sounds of….. From here on things turn a lot less bright &  lightly glowing- we go from simmer & sinister spectral drift of “Municipally, I let it slip”, which at times has a grim almost dungeon ambient feel about it.  Onto the foreboding creepy organ meets gloomy gliding & hovering string loops of “Peers and pulses”, though to the malevolent almost metallic tinged post-industrial cold ambience of “Thoughts ultimately of consciousness”. With the album finishing off with the locked angular harmonic meets gently coldly jangling hover of “And rejected as ours will be”.

On the whole, Scols isn’t as approachable & instantly appealing as some of Long’s work- but each track is well-realized & composed, and if you in the mood for grimmer & gloomy drone matter I’d  say this will hit that glum spot.