New week, new Celer. I don’t even have a calender in my house — I just stick Will Long’s records to my wall every month. Just last week we were singing the praises of his new record for Chloe Harris’ Further label, under the alias of Mogodor, which saw a more space-respecting, even Frahmian approach to ambient — let the silences speak to their sounds. Celer’s usually about the covering approach, though, and ‘Tempelhof’ offers an unwavering, blissfully foggy set of drones that sit in place of that horrible thing we don’t call sound.
You know what to expect if you’re already familiar with Celer, but otherwise, this might just be a good starting point. It’s a surprisingly huge record, with the layering of “Lights Inside and Ahead” creating a triumphant, seemingly vocal effect in the vein of Grouper and the recent Ekin Fil record. Long also calls upon his collaging chops here, using vocal samples of different public transport stops on “Transfer to Frankfurt”, “Beijing Layover” and “Night Train to Berlin”, as if using ambient music the way you use a time lapse shot in a TV show — this music sees day cross into night back into day, folding the passerby conversations and moving mechanics into light, endless chords. It wouldn’t just make good travelling music, this: it would do the travelling for you.
It’s a lovely record of quite neutral ambience — some will read a deep melancholy into it, others will find it shimmering and summery. Like much of Celer’s music, the best thing about it is its pick-your-own-adventure listenership: it moves so fluidly that you can adapt it to whatever you’re doing, whether passive or active.