textura

Albums
17 Pygmies
Ælab
Aeroc
Adrian Aniol
Aleph
Artificial Memory Trace
B. Schizophonic / Onodera
Blue Fields
The Boats
Canyons of Static
Celer
drog_A_tek
Fennesz + Sakamoto
Marcus Fischer
Les Fragments de la Nuit
Daniel Thomas Freeman
From the Mouth of the Sun
Goth-Trad
Karol Gwózdz
Mark Harris
Inverz
Kingbastard
Tatsuro Kojima
Robert Lippok
Maps and Diagrams
Merzouga
Message To Bears
mpld
The New Law
Nuojuva
Octave One
Petrels
Puresque
Refractor
Lasse-Marc Riek
Jim Rivers
Dennis Rollins
Scuba
Shigeto
Susurrus
Jason Urick
VVV
Williamette
Windy & Carl
Zomes

Compilations / Mixes
DJ-Kicks: The Exclusives
Future Disco Volume 5
King Deluxe Year One
Phonography Meeting
Pop Ambient 2012

EPs
Blixaboy
Matthew Dear
Fovea Hex
Jacksonville
Kurzwellen 0
Phasen
Pascal Savy

Inverz: My Machines
Granny Records

Recorded between autumn and winter of 2010, Inverz's My Machines spreads six slabs of electro-acoustic dark ambient across two twelve-inch vinyl sides (available in 250 copies). It's the fourth release under the Inverz name by Savvas Metaxas, who's otherwise known as the guitarist in Good Luck Mr. Gorsky. It's only natural, then, that guitar figures prominently in the album's material, but, having said that, it would be misleading to characterize My Machines as a guitar-based album, as the instrument is just one of many that make up the album's sound world. As stated, Inverz's material is generally dark ambient in nature, with Metaxas drawing upon a wealth of manipulated vinyl samples as well as sounds culled from musical and non-musical sources for the album's construction. Electric and acoustic guitars, synthesizers, and field recordings constitute some of the sources Metaxas used to produce the six settings.

It wouldn't be stretching things too far to say that the album often plays like a quintessential Miasmah release, especially during those moments when cavernous, dungeon-like spaces are evoked. Consider “A Series of Tragic Events,” whose creaking noises suggest some hapless victim being strapped into a torture device, as one such example (the presence of ghoulish chantings only makes the track seem all the more unearthly). Also consistent with the Miasmah style, a neo-classical dimension emerges during the ultra-woozy “SVL” when a vocal loop swims alongside shuddering fragments of orchestral instruments. Elsewhere, macabre industrial clatterings resonate within a ghostly, crackled-infested zone during “This Machine Is Dead,” resulting in a haunted gloomscape that's like some diseased, long-buried memory welling up from the unconscious. Relatively becalmed by comparison, the final piece “About Closure” carves a ponderous path through a ruined landscape of guitar strums and violin scrapings. Those with a jones for hell-bound ambient soundscaping could do a whole lot worse than sample Inverz's plunge into the dark side.

February 2012