“Ambient from A to Z, Hiraeth inhales as much the complexity of the divided feelings as this joy of living through Andy Codon's devils”
1 Hiraeth 38:01 Glimmer Room Bandcamp
(DDL 38:01) (VF) (Purely ambient music)
Andy had warned me well. HIRAETH is an ambient album. An album of ambient music, quiet and meditative. On my side I would add; a music of taciturn ambiences of which the only movements are waves of implosion that bring out the music outside its anesthetic bed. It doesn't matter! I love the music of Andy Condon. That it is with Jupiter 8, The Glimmer Room or yet like here with The Long Light of which it's the second album, the first one being Our Waking Hours in 2014. HIRAETH is an old Welsh saying which means that a longing for a home you can never return to, a home which may never have existed at all. As one notices, our friend Andy always possesses this soul of sound poet.
The adventure begins with a flock of birds' chirpings. A synth puts down some chords which resound with tenderness in this bucolic decor where my ears hear fairies' murmurs through layers of ether and Morpheus whispers. A heavy layer of bass widens its shroud of worry, already plunging Hiraeth into an ambience of torment. It's this line of bass that will blow the implosions of the 1st part of this long title which wears without lengthiness its 38 minutes. This urges another one to get loose, creating two parallel movements which have nothing in common. One is dark and the other sibylline! Without lengthiness effects! Because in spite of the serenity here, Andy Codon gives it implosive impulses which are translated by thin lines of emotion and musicality. Like these lines of acute flute which go and come in a landscape of which the shadows of the sounds take many forms. The chords dance and tinkle after the point of 10 minutes, bringing the first phase of Hiraeth towards a passage where the crackling of a fire gives it a second life. This second part announces a more celestial, a more ethereal progression with a passage clearly more luminous than the dark shadows which moved it in the first 18 minutes. The singings of birds are replaced by sparkling of arpeggios which stay all the same in the background when buzzing layers give a dark vision but not schemer to an ambient music which bears a little more The Glimmer Room's signature here.
Andy Condon doesn't have to be shy of his music. He stays in a class of his own by breathing a clearly more human vision into his meditative music than many artists in this kind of music art. His music inhales as much the complexity of the divided feelings as this joy of living through his devils. Another beautiful album that will please his fans. Hopefully other fans of this kind of music will be interested one day in his music, because I Remain remains the most hard-hitting, the most impressive and the most emotive work in contemporary ambient music.
Sylvain Lupari (May 2nd, 2018) *****
Available on The Glimmer Room Bandcamp