Articles
2009 Top 10s and 20s
King Midas Sound
Starke

Albums
36
Aardvarck
Matias Aguayo
Anaphoria
Anduin
Arbol + Fibla
Aufgang
Beneva vs. Clark Nova
Black to Comm
Bvdub
Cornstar
Dinky
Enola
Fieldhead
FOURM / Shinkei / Turra
Billy Gomberg
The Green Kingdom
Chihei Hatakeyama
Ian Hawgood
Marek Hemmann
Khate
King Midas Sound
Marcel Knopf
Robot Koch
Lambent
Shinobu Nemoto
Olekranon
Laurent Perrier
Piano Magic
Porzellan
Pylône
Ryonkt
Shadyzane
Slow
Small Color
Solomun
The Sound of Lucrecia
Stray Ghost
The Use of Ashes
Sylvie Walder

Compilations / Mixes
Sebo K
Will Saul
Tama Sumo
VOLTT Amsterdam Vol. 1

EPs
Blindhæð
Roberto Bosco
Franco Cangelli
Dieb
dub KULT
Abe Duque/Blake Baxter
Gemmy
Christopher Hobbs
Duncan Ó Ceallaigh
Christopher Roberts
The Sight Below
Two Fourteen
Van Der Papen
Andy Vaz
Vetrix
Eddie Zarook

DVD
Optofonica

The Use of Ashes: White Nights: Glowing Lights
Tonefloat

Listening to The Use of Ashes' White Nights: Glowing Lights, I'm reminded of nothing less than songs such as “The Gnome,” “Matilda Mother,” “Scarecrow,” “Bike,” and “See Emily Play” from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the 1967 debut album by Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd (that's a compliment, by the way). In White Nights: Glowing Lights' eighteen short songs, The Use of Ashes members Peter van Vliet, Simon van Vliet, and Maarten Scherrenburg instill a similarly trippy and psych-folk vibe into their own oblique song constructions (song titles alone—“The Sky-Cracked Children,” one example of many—convey as much all by themselves). Like prototypical Barrett songs, the album's settings veer off on unexpected melodic tangents, and do so with gentle vocals accompanied by eccentric instrumentation (tabla, organ, sitar, mellotron, flute, glockenspiel, analogue synthesizer, zither) as well as more conventional guitar and keyboard sounds.

The first song alone, “Morgenstern (the Umbrella Jigsaw Man),” tells the tale. After an opening oboe melody, the vocalists sing “Take off your hat / Take off your hair and skin / Let me see what's within” while kettledrums pound and a mellotron whispers in the background. The gentle vocal harmonies heard in “Stranger in Paradise,” “Forever Comes With the Morning,” “The Prince With the Golden Hair,” “White Dream,” and many other songs make clear that the group's sound has little in common with the freak-folk of Animal Collective and its ilk; instead, The Use Of Ashes feels closer in spirit to Simon & Garfunkel (on vocal grounds) and Daevid Allen-era Gong than to any contemporary psych-folk ensemble. “Lazy Daisy Day” is as pastoral and peaceful as its title suggests, the brief diversion “White Night” offers a field recordings-and-organ sound collage, and “9 Glowing Lights” unspools nearly eight droning minutes of ambient swirl. Needless to say, the album (preceded by The Hand of Tzafkiël, the new collection is the second volume in a cycle of interconnected releases) also comes as a surprise for being issued by Tonefloat, the Netherlands-based label best known for its Dirk Serries and Fear Falls Burning releases. Certainly those albums, as distinguished as they are, include little of the luminous and floating qualities that give White Nights: Glowing Lights such a refreshingly dream-like character.

December 2009