Title: Delirium Vultures
Artist: Clayton Alpha
Released: March 2013
Genre: Ambient
Label: Haze
Catalog Number: HAZE202
License: CC BY-NC-SA
Once again a turn to drone ambient works fills your ears in this release. One of the things about this kind of music is that it needs something to unify it on several levels. Not just on the individual tracks, but across the recording as a whole.
And that is where this release doesn’t work for me. The individual tracks are okay with their drones loops and sparse additional instrumentation, but trying to reach the level where there is a structure to the whole recording is elusive.
Ideally, the title “Delirium Vultures” would give me something to work with in the same way the “White Leaves” pieces on the Fog Sequences by Kevin Krebs does. With that release I had the perception of peering through fog, trying to make out the indistinct shapes in the distance, the disorienting failure of depth perception to understand what I was seeing.
But, with “Delirium Vultures” I don’t have that feeling. I don’t know what I am supposed to experience. Even individual track titles like “Attrition” and “I Feel Therefore I Hate” really didn’t offer a frame of reference for me. And that is the problem with this release. I have the feeling that I should have an experience, but I can’t find it.
But accepting the pieces on their auditory face isn’t a bad thing. They are well thought out and interesting in a purely abstract analytic respect. They can even be treated as just background noise. That is what ambient works are supposed to be about, right? Well kind of. There is still a key element missing: the enhancement of ones environment.
So, I’m hard pressed to give this release a good review overall. It works fine as background noise, or something to listen to on your headphones to isolate other sounds around you. And it doesn’t distract you too much from doing other things. But, it doesn’t really work when listening to it in any other manner: no real relationships between the titles and the pieces, nothing that gives the listener any kind of experience, and the pieces don’t seem to fit an overall “whole”.
Clayton Alpha: Delirium Vultures
Free
6.5
‘why spend time on stuff that you don’t like?’
In order to experience and share the outcome. Unbiased.
‘There’s so much out there, is there more value in having a guide to things that are good?’
At least I don’t think so. It’s simple to follow a hype. It’s common to produce good reviews for clients. It’s difficult, it seems, to make unbiased comments nowadays. Your review as an example, you downloaded something and you found it at least worth commenting on. No matter it helps selling.
I like that! That’s my point, that’s what I expect from reviews outside the mainstream circus.
Thanks again.
Wow, a drone review. Tough job. Moreover you picked deliberately a release that you do not really like and did a fair job describing the difficulties you had listening to it.
You could have picked something else instead, a release that’s somehow mindblowing or so. But you didn’t. I conclude that this is perhaps a rather interesting release, maybe a challenge.
I’ll give it a try.
Thanks.
I like drone works. Lot’s of the Kevin Krebs releases are great, I also liked The Lovely Moon release I reviewed last week.
Yes, I tend to chose releases that I like over ones that I don’t. That will probably change some if I start paying more attention to “charts” (like the Jamendo Top 100, or CC Hits) and start reviewing those releases. I am considering this for the future so I have a more rounded collection of reviews, instead of just publishing things that I like. But there’s always the flip side of this: why spend time on stuff that you don’t like? There’s so much out there, is there more value in having a guide to things that are good?
So, I kind of struggle with that.
George