Various - Richmond Ambient Boxset
[SMTG Limited]

The launch of the new SMTG website also brought some intriguing news in the shape of forthcoming releases. The Virginian-based label will issue the follow-up to Anduin’s promising The River’s Path in both vinyl and CD formats and will feature collaborations with both Xela and Jasper TX. If that isn’t enough to get the mouth watering, then news of a 12-inch LP release from sought after “acoustic doom” merchant Svarte Greiner certainly will. SMTG though, despite an international flavour to their release itinerary, haven’t forgotten the domestic scene that surrounds them and this smart, collectors edition boxset of 3” discs, entitled 'Richmond Ambient' delivers four very different, yet equally exciting homegrown talents.

First up is Ventoux, the work of multi-instrumentalist (and one-third of Souvenir’s Young America) Graham Scala. Three tracks spread over twenty minutes worth of oppressive, skull-rattling ambient noise. '3-1' is a dense affair featuring forlorn, orchestral textures buried under a thick canopy of rumbling, monolithic haze. The melancholic tones collide spectacularly with waves of static and hiss, leaving afterthoughts of volcanic landscapes. If volcanoes emitted music instead of lava, this would surely be their sound. Equally as impressive is '3-2', which arranges a recurring theme of spectral resonance and ear-piercing into something that is oddly reminiscent of an air-raid siren or a kamikaze plane hurtling in a downward spiral at a ferocious speed towards the ground.

Adam Hudson’s epic 18-minute long 'Sounds for Deleted Spaces' begins the next disc with a series of drones that feel as though they are trapped inside your head. Under his Monolith Zero guise, Hudson incorporates these drones with tape effects, clicks and feedback initially evoking images of underwater life or an unexplored ocean bed, deep beneath the surface, the sonar-like squalls and dense atmospherics adding to the experience. This soon all gives way unexpectedly to a chain of experimental, industrial machine chatter, not a million miles away from the work of German pioneer Asmus Tietchens. Enveloping his composition in a torrent of increasingly violent static, like a concentrated digital rain, distant obscured voices add a chilling layer of texture to 'Sounds For...' before crumbling into white noise and then nothingness. Sheer extreme noise terror.

Noah Saval will be an unfamiliar name to most, but fans of Souvenir’s Young America will certainly recognize his distinctive harmonica tones on the five-track 'Songs for Tanyua'. Saval, of course, was responsible for the harmonica sounds on SYA’s An Ocean Without Water. Teaming up once again with SYA comrade Anduin (Jonathan Lee), who provides a particularly apocalyptic organ/electronic backdrop, the bluesy drawl emitted from Saval’s instrument, initially seems like an odd juxtaposition of sounds, out of place and rather irregular. However, repeated plays of the likes of 'Tuesday Night', a vast Morricone-like number as desolate as Death Valley itself, will ultimately reward such patience. Saval’s efforts here are the most inventive of all four participants and his style soon takes an intoxicating hold, such as the serpentine harmonica lines featured on 'Beach House Blues', which snake around the hypnotic backdrop to mesmeric effect.

Rounding this intriguing collector’s item off is Kenneth Yates’ Caustic Castle. Somewhat of a local noise hero, Yates has previously put his name to several projects and an impressive amount of net-based releases, 'Makepiece' is not for the faint-hearted. Kicking off with knotted, high pitched oscillations which sit together as comfortably as a child in a dentist chair. Yates then proceeds to bend and distort these signals to almost breaking point until you are aware of everything around you, before detonating wall of blackened silence, intercepted only by wraith-like voices and phantom breaths. As if his digital equipment is melting or that the binary code is evaporating 'Makepiece' then catapults into a deeply unsettling segment of chilling atmospherics and indecipherable voices, ensuring that this composition is the absolute antithesis of what the term ambient has come to be perceived as.

A jarring, disconcerting journey through landscapes of strange experimental ambience and digital terror, 'Richmond Ambient' serves to highlight four artists who have creativity in abundance and bring their own quirks and invention to the table. Well worth investigating, these limited edition sounds can be obtained individually or as part of this recommended boxset, as SMTG Limited set about carving a unique niche of their own.