There Were More Failures Than This réunit quatre pièces parues d’abord uniquement en format numérique en 2021. Réalisées à partir de boucles de bandes et d’instruments analogiques, elles sont dans la filiation de It Would be Giving Up (août 2020).

Le premier titre, “Like Art, Wandering”, presque une demie heure, a imposé la présence de Celer. Ce torrent ambiant balaie tout. Énorme boucle frangée d’éclaboussures, la pièce est monolithique, terrifiante et prodigieuse à la fois. Comme si nous étions dans la matrice de l’Énergie, une énergie colossale, déferlante, perpétuellement renaissante, au cœur de laquelle on croit entendre les fantômes de multiples voix vaporisées. Magistrale errance !

La seconde pièce, “Whatever I’m Doing, it’s Wrong”, si elle est moins immersive, prend l’allure d’un lamento lamentable : impossible de sortir de la boucle infernale qui vrille le cerveau nettoyé sous haute pression, envahi de percussions frémissantes et bourdonnantes. L’orgue se tord sous le sentiment torturant de l’échec. Deuxième réussite majeure !

Je suis moins enthousiaste pour “At Last”, pièce vraiment déprimante, qui n’en finit pas de finir. Heureusement, “Oro Oro” redresse la tête. S’agit-il  d’un acte d’adoration réitéré à une divinité ? Le titre énigmatique laisse le champ libre. Cette quatrième boucle dépassant la demie heure soumet l’auditeur à rude épreuve : tiendra-t-il la durée ? Comme tout mantra, il tend à effacer le sentiment du moi. Il faut accepter de se perdre dans l’Incommensurable. Pas facile. Je préfère nettement les deux premières pièces.

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The title alone, “There Were More Failures Than This”, beckons us into a world where the personal and cosmic collide in an endless series of disappointments. Yet, as with all things Celer, the journey is less about the destination and more about the meandering path — a path paved with the melancholy remnants of forgotten dreams and half-remembered memories.

Celer, the brainchild of Will Long, has long been the quiet poet of ambient music, crafting soundscapes that feel more like faded Polaroids than compositions. With this release — a lavish 4CD set, no less — Long continues to explore the spaces between sound and silence, reality and imagination. Originally released digitally in 2021, “There Were More Failures Than This” has been resurrected in physical form, allowing listeners to engage with its fragile beauty in a way that feels both tangible and transient, like holding a snowflake just long enough for it to melt in your hand.

Each of the four tracks, spanning a generous two hours of runtime, acts as a vignette of some forgotten past, each a delicate interplay of tape loops and analog instrumentation. The liner notes tell us that these pieces were made with tape loops and analog instruments, pushing “into the reaches of oblivion” and “imagining alternate realities”. There’s a certain irony here: music so steeped in the warmth of analog sound, yet so coldly distant, as if these loops were not just recorded on tape, but somehow etched into the fabric of time itself. Stephan Mathieu’s remastering only adds to this effect, polishing the rough edges of these recordings into something that feels both timeless and ephemeral.

The opening cd/track, “Like Art, Wandering”, is a 27-minute meditation that could be the soundtrack to a film that never existed — an auditory equivalent of watching dust motes drift through a shaft of sunlight. The title suggests aimlessness, yet there’s a meticulousness in how Celer layers each loop, each gentle swell of sound. As the liner notes hint, this album is a “conjuring of a myriad of memory, false and real, remembered and forgotten”, and no track embodies that duality more than this one. It’s music that feels more discovered than composed, as if it had always existed somewhere out in the ether, waiting to be captured.

“Whatever I’m Doing, It’s Wrong” continues in this vein, its 22-minute runtime echoing the sentiment of the title with a delicate balance of uncertainty and resolve. There’s a quiet desperation here, the kind that comes from knowing you’re not on the right path, but lacking the energy or will to change course. The sound here is dense, almost suffocating, yet it’s the kind of suffocation that brings comfort rather than panic—like the weight of a thick blanket on a cold night. The liner notes talk of “fires continuing to burn, even if from afar”, and this track feels like the smoldering embers of a once-raging inferno, now subdued but still alive.

The third cd/track, “At Last”, offers a glimmer of hope in its title, but true to form, Celer subverts any expectation of resolution or redemption. Instead, we’re left with a 23-minute elegy for things that never were, a sonic landscape that feels perpetually on the verge of collapse. And yet, it doesn’t collapse. It endures, like a memory that refuses to fade, no matter how much you wish it would. The liner notes describe this work as a “wall-of-sound approach to world building”, and here that wall feels both insurmountable and oddly comforting, like the last refuge in a crumbling world.

The final piece on the fourth cd, “Oro Oro”, is the longest at 34 minutes, and here Celer pulls out all the stops—if by “pulling out all the stops” we mean quietly letting go of everything and allowing the music to drift into nothingness. There’s a sense of resignation here, a peaceful acceptance that whatever failures came before, they were simply part of the journey. The sound is vast, almost infinite, yet paradoxically intimate, like a whispered confession in a cathedral. As the liner notes poetically put it, this album is about “riding along that dusty highway to nowhere”, and “Oro Oro” feels like the final stretch of that endless road, where the destination no longer matters.

Comparisons to other ambient giants like Stars of the Lid or William Basinski are inevitable, but Celer’s approach feels distinctly his own. Where Basinski dwells in decay and Stars of the Lid in the majesty of stillness, Celer occupies a space of quiet introspection, where even the failures are beautiful in their own way. And perhaps that’s the most striking thing about “There Were More Failures Than This”: it’s an album that turns failure into something worth celebrating, a reminder that sometimes the most profound experiences are the ones that leave us feeling just a bit lost.

Related to the recently reviewed release “It Would Be Giving Up”, “There Were More Failures Than This” sounds like a quiet catastrophe in four acts. It’s an invitation to lose yourself in the music, to let go of expectations, and to find beauty in the quiet, in the forgotten, in the failures… And maybe, just maybe, in doing so, you’ll discover that there’s something to be said for wandering, even if you never quite find your way home.