“Indulging yourself” – Sound Projector Magazine raves about “Red Sun”
written by Paul Khimasia MorganPosted in Recent arrivals Tagged with ambient, composed, drone, piano
“This album is like indulging yourself in a European city break. You dive headlong into the cultural activities you might passively ignore in your own town: museums, galleries, landmarks, theatres, concert halls, all are visited zealously while you studiously refuse to acknowledge the strengths of your own location. Okay, Paris, Vienna or Bruges have far better architecture than Brighton or Bournemouth but let’s not forget that Brighton Museum hosted the first UK exhibition of Don Van Vliet’s paintings and The Russell Cotes museum in Bournemouth has a fantastic collection of Japanese ceramics and a fellow who plays the grand piano in the foyer daily. These are just examples. And then when you do get home, you start noticing all the interesting things about where you live all over again. What I’m getting at is that to me, immersing myself in Red Sun is a bit like temporarily being shown an ideal in contemporary music, and then listening with fresh ears to your other records, environment, home, washing machine and so forth.”
“The music in question is meditative, melodic and magisterial, and these beautiful meditations become more strident and forceful as the album progresses. Walentynowicz demonstrates a gentle touch using techniques such as faint delays, lo-fi piano recordings, re-sampling, tasteful dissonance, tone manipulation and drone generation. The first piece, ‘Sun Spot’, starts with an electronic buzz and builds on a three note piano refrain; piano pop like a stop-motion ‘Moments In Love’ by The Art of Noise. Glowicka inserts a well-judged reverse effect at the end. The following piece, ‘Transient’, begins with same electronic buzz and three note piano refrain but then develops the music with field recordings from inside a concrete bunker. ‘Favola’ continues the sonic abstraction of the core elements, this time the piano is played staccato in the high register, while horror film style reverse effects are inlaid.”
“The title track heralds a change in mood. The notes becoming discordant and out-of-phase, as if there were two versions of the piece running simultaneously slightly out of time with each other. One piano is close up in the mix, the other distant. Very pleasant, particularly with the aforementioned tasteful dissonance dialled back in. It occurred to me that this track, ‘Red Sun’, could sit very well in the ECM catalogue. Then follows the two longest pieces on the disc, at 14 and 17 minutes respectively. ‘Retina’ begins with the bare essentials. The technique of one piano close up again as in ‘Red Sun’, the second seemingly far away. Glowicka utilises reversed long piano notes to good effect.”
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