Forest Management: Doux
Polar Seas Recordings

There's minimal and then there's minimal: Doux, by way of illustration, is about as stripped-down as ambient gets. The fifty-three-minute set is the latest release from the prolific Chicago-based producer John Daniel, who recorded the material during November 2017 in Cleveland and Chicago. It's his first appearance on the Toronto-based Polar Seas imprint, following material he issued on Constellation Tatsu and Lillerne Tapes earlier in the year.

Released in a fifty-copy CD-R edition, Doux features four settings ranging in duration from six to twenty minutes, the longest the opening “Marview,” which, like the other three, largely hews to a single pitch. Listening interest doesn't therefore derive from anything melody-related but instead the way the sound design modulates across time. As the droning mass reverberates, it takes on the character of a constantly evolving abstract design that sees colours and patterns morphing into others, the changes so subtly effected and modest in number that even the tiniest shift in presentation registers as a dramatic gesture. Giving one's full attention to the material, the listener enters a somewhat hallucinatory state, such that one begins to wonder whether those vague rumblings or high-pitched whistling tones emerging within “Marview” are physically present or merely imagined.

December 2017