“An album of dark and desperate ambiences where the visions of a universe of coldness fills our ears with a murky silence from winter stones”
1 Winter Stone - Part 1 10:12
2 Winter Stone - Part 2 12:22
3 Winter Stone - Part 3 25:44
4 Winter Stone (Full Session) 47:48
(DDL 47:48) (V.F)
(Dark ambient)
Do you know, or remember Stephen Parsick? One of the founding members of ['ramp] liked to walk around on cold winter nights with his recorder. He thus captured sounds and inspirations to create his series of Doombient albums. It's according to this principle that DASK has conceived WINTER STONE. An album of music of dark and desperate ambiences where the visions of a universe of coldness even succeed in freezing the big rocks. In music, this long symphony of a winter's night by David Marsh translates into an interesting encounter where my ears did not have this need to be alert as the 48 minutes of WINTER STONE, available only for download, are so passive.
Winter Stone - Part 1 opens with echo effects picked up on the recorder and amplified while giving it an evasive form. Submissive, there are no rhythms, nor melodies in this universe of ice transposed by the creativity of the English musician. Except those that our imagination forges. Because Winter Stone - Part 1 can look like a river of ice, the winds that reflect on its frozen carcass form movements that only the amplification can pick up and transmit to our ears. It's all about perception in this album! This continuous synth layer smashing with the sinuosity of the geological character of a river detaches filaments which take on a different hue, thus giving the perception of acoustics degrading in a sound envelope plagued by a perpetual bite of the cold. Thus, are born the multiple colors and shapes of reverberations. There are faint gambols on this structure where I imagine northern hares coming out of their den to do their morning exercises. It's all about perception! Winter Stone - Part 2 is the throat of the cold spitting out its abundant falls of icy water whose power of the jets plays with the emotions of the observer. The movement changes a little after the 4th minute, taking a deep breath to expel breezes with hybrid and opposing tones in an almost astral calm. An artificial quietude that gets broken the will when confronted with the deaf aggressive buzzes of Winter Stone - Part 3. This longest track of WINTER STONE extends a long quiet phase after its frothy opening. The cold whispers its pain to us with these lines of reverberations twitched in a universe without aid in dying. Passive, this monument of immersive atmospheres follows its route with a little more buzzing and/or irradiating phases to return to its gentle linear route until its mortuary finale.
You must like dark ambient to appreciate this new endeavor from DASK. If one likes Steve Roach's Immersion series, should appreciate these 3 long unexciting movements that David Marsh welds into a long structure for those who appreciate more the MP3 format. I found out that it's an album that can be listened without be annoyed and as always, this genre is not the one that I particularly appreciate.
Sylvain Lupari (04/11/21) ***½**
Available at DASK Bandcamp