Celer + Forest Management: Landmarks
Constellation Tatsu

Anyone acquainted with the respective discographies of Celer, the long-time project of Tokyo-based Will Long, and Forest Management, otherwise known as American ambient producer John Daniel, will come to their first collaboration with a fairly informed idea of what to expect. Such expectations won't be disconfirmed by the cassette release, though it does contain a few surprises. Using tape machines, loops, and computers, the two have produced an audio re-imagining of The Mosquito Coast, the 1981 novel by Paul Theroux that Peter Weir made into a film five years later starring Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, and River Phoenix. In simple terms, the story presents Ford as inventor Allie Fox, who, disenchanted with American consumerism and culture, abandons the United States with his family for what he hopes will be a simpler and happier life in the jungles of Central America; needless to say, things don't turn out quite as planned for the patriarch and his family.

Presented in fourteen parts, Landmarks offsets minimal ambient soundscapes of the kind associated with both Long and Daniel with vignette-like pieces (three each less than a minute long), and it's the contrast between the two, as well as the variety and unpredictability of the shorter tracks, that makes for interesting listening. To that end, a serene, ten-minute opening exercise in ambient drift gives way to a three-minute evocation of the heat-drenched jungle environment, one replete with chirping birds and foreboding drum accents. Later shifts see a brief snippet of spoken dialogue lifted from the film, a minute-long swirl of shimmering vapours, and a hissing soundscape filled with clattering noises and field recordings-styled details sandwiched between the rumbling ambient lull of “Indistinguishable From Magic” and the billowing, Gas-styled hydraulics of “Embera.” Ford's voice briefly appears in “5,000 Feet Under the Surface” to solidify the connection between the release and source material, while an ambient soundscape such as the beatific closer “Rights of the Idea or a Machine” puts some degree of distance between them.

One guesses that Long and Daniel were drawn to the project idea because of their own nostalgic feelings about another time and a way of life, admittedly one partly imagined, different from our own. Whatever it was that attracted them to it, it's resulted in a long-form, concept-styled recording that's considerably more engaging for being so abundant in contrast.

February 2018