textura

Albums
Actress
Ellen Allien
The Alps
Aniline
Anodyne
Tommy Babin's Benzene
Maya Beiser
Pier Bucci
Budd & Wright
Celer
Ceremony
Richard Chartier
Deceptikon
Deepchord & Echospace
Marcel Dettmann
Dirac
Efdemin
GéNIA
Guillaume & C. Dumonts
Hammock
Helvacioglu & Boysen
Richard A Ingram
Inhabitants
Marsen Jules
Akira Kosemura
Manual
Dom Mino'
Teruyuki Nobuchika
Nono/ Wakabayashi
Olan Mill
Originalljudet
Fabio Orsi
M.Ostermeier
Rene Hell
Jeffrey Roden
J. Rogers
Roll The Dice
Secret Cities
Soundpool

Compilations / Mixes
Main Control Board
SEED X: Part I - III

EPs
Alternative Networks Vol. 2
Aural Diptych Series # 1
Aural Diptych Series # 2
Celer
Deerhoof vs OneOne
Filterwolf
Incite/
Ketem
Kogumaza
Yann Novak
Poratz
Quiroga
Repeat Orchestra
Sepalcure
Sub Loam
v4w.enko
The Zeitgeist EP

DVD
Stephen Vitiello

Hammock: Chasing After Shadows...Living With the Ghosts
Hammock Music

While Hammock's third album, 2008's Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow, stripped Hammock's sound back to its bare minimum with Andrew Thompson and Marc Byrd Byrd recording its rhythm-less tracks using only electric guitars and pedal boards, the follow-up, Chasing After Shadows…Living with the Ghosts, moves in the opposite direction, and we're all the better for it doing so. The album's multi-layered, shoegaze-rich sound is a thing of beauty indeed, and fits naturally alongside recordings by Robin Guthrie and Sigur Rós.

The album's twelve settings are like instrumental mini-cathedrals teeming with pealing guitar melodies, atmospheric washes, strings, pianos, acoustic drums, and an occasional vocal. The album is charged with emotion, as chiming melodies soar continually upwards, aiming for transcendance. Chasing After Shadows…Living with the Ghosts' epic tone is immediately set by “The Backward Step,” a towering five minutes of shoegaze guitars, cellos, and drums, and, though there are subtle deviations in tempo and dynamics in the eleven tunes that come after, they generally follow the opener's lead. Adding a wordless, high-pitched vocal motif to “Breathturn” pushes the lilting track—not unwelcomingly—into Sigur Rós territory for six dazzling minutes, and vocals also surface during the hymnal nine-minute splendour of “You Lost the Starlight in Your Eyes.” At times, the drums sit out completely, leaving a track such as “How Can I Make You Remember Me?” to unspool like a humming mass of guitar-generated vapours.

If there's a weakness, it's that oh-so-familiar one of length. At seventy-two minutes, the album could withstand some judicious editing—a sleepy mid-album track such as “Andalusia” a candidate, perhaps?—to bring it down to a more concise fifty- to fifty-five-minute running time. For the record, the release also is available in a deluxe version with the CD accompanied by a book collaboration with photographer Thomas Petillo, a hardback volume North West East South that features an ambient EP containing four songs and 100 images Petillo shot while on four trips with Hammock between 2005-09.

June 2010