Every release of “Celer”, no matter if it is new material or, as in this particular case, a reissue (“Rags Of Contentment” was produced two years ago as a limited edition cassette), is introduced with a short story from Will Long. It is even more likely a stream of consciousness inspired by recollections of things and people that surrounded musicians when they worked on one or another album. This CD is supplemented by pictures from Nepal which Danielle Long took when she travelled around the country: Apparently, serious faces of those who live on top of the mountains and roofs of temples that lean on the sky are to sensitize a listener to a well-defined “exotic” mood, but a few phrases from Will himself, as currently one and only member of the project, drastically changes this mood. Will projects night silence of Santa Ana outskirts, a car where Brian Eno’s CDs are played, and black night cloth that is ripped occasionally by only bright flashes of passing motors. And you know what? It is a perfect description of “Rags Of Contentment”. Night, flashes, space filled with music that flows through a half-open window and disappears into silence…and probably a stack of those pictures that help to refresh recollections and day-dream a little, while gradually drowning oneself in tired half-slumber. This half-slumber is the ideal state for listening to “Celer”, and it is caused by this music too.
“Pleased To Be In A State Of Sour Resplendency” represents thirty seven minutes of quiet sounds which seem to be smoothly swimming past you at a distance, of trembling and vibrant sounds in the night cool air which overlap each other and equally slowly move apart. It is an acoustic imitation of car lights, fading in the steamy window like a flicker which dies out slowly and which for a sleepy person seems to be eternal, frozen in time. “Things Gone And Still Here”, a meditation on things gone and still ongoing here and now, develops this mood, turning with exemplary minimalism the predecessor’s sounds which are already unhurried into vanishing, wearing thin pieces of some inidentified melody, and if you want you can hear sad and even dramatic notes in it, or is it your own assumption in an effort to fill lacunas of this narrative with no beginning and end?
“Rags Of Contentment” is “another” album of «Celer», another long journey through the womb of night, through memory, through blurred dozy phantoms and vague evanescent silhouettes. Very quiet, even intimate and definitely beautiful music.