Albums
Atmogat
Autechre
Autistici
Bitcrush
Black Gold 360
Sylvain Chauveau
Cut Iowa Network
Delicate Noise
Dof
The Element Choir
FNS
Four Tet
Gutta Percha
Greg Haines
Chihei Hatakeyama
Ian Hawgood
Jóhann Jóhannsson
Kahn and Mueller
Konntinent
L/M/R/W
Francisco López
Aaron Martin
Musette
Near The Parenthesis
Offthesky
Dustin O'Halloran
Redhooker
Relmic Statute
Ruxpin
Sintetic-Collage
Sister Overdrive
Starkey
Tokyo Mask
Youth Pictures of F. Hend.
Compilations / Mixes
Agoria
Advent
My Private Space
Peeling
Untitled 10
EPs
Amman.Josh
A Wake A Week
Tolga Baklacioglu
Boxharp
Cursor Miner
Abe Duque
EPROM / Eskmo
Funckarma
Florent Ghys
LJ Kruzer
Lobisomem
Maps and Diagrams
Moving Dawn Orchestra
Marcello Napoletano
Alexandre Navarro
Obsidian
Glen Porter
Nigel Samways
The Soul's Release
Sparkhouse / Jacksonville
Subeena
Talvihorros
Near The Parenthesis: Music for the Forest Concourse
n5MD
Anyone still unconvinced that electronic music can convey emotion need only listen to Tim Arndt's fourth Near The Parenthesis album for n5MD, Music For The Forest Concourse, to be convinced otherwise. Arndt has an uncanny talent for maximizing the emotional side of his material, with the result serenading tracks brimming with showers of synthetic sparkle and plaintive piano melodies. With its elegant piano playing wrapped in swathes of electronics, the album opener “Good Evening” proves a particularly good exemplar of the style, as does “Inertia (Stay Right Here),” where equally lovely piano playing meanders through a garden of electronic delights.
Generally speaking, the hour-long collection is a predictably stirring set from the San Francisco-based producer, who first gained attention with his 2006 release Go Out and See on the Canadian imprint Music Made By People. In Arndt's own words, Music For The Forest Concourse is “for dusk, for open air, for sitting down, and for breathing in. It is music for staring upwards and listening attentively or casually.” Though such a description emphasizes the music's calming dimension, his material can also work up a fair degree of intensity, as tracks such as “Pollarding Trees” and “Diffused” make clear (the latter could even be called shoegaze, if a guitar-less variant of it). In almost every case, Arndt gets the job done in about five minutes' time, so the album moves efficiently from one track to the next. He also brings immense craft to the construction of his multi-layered settings; though each features a wealth of sounds—beats, strings, flickering electronics, an occasional voice recording—, a sense of clarity pervades, in large part due to the central presence of the piano. How fitting it is that the quietly rapturous lullaby with which the album ends, “Good Night,” should be so strongly anchored by the instrument.
April 2010