Songs about the river are a common trope in the history of music. Psalms of being cleansed, being baptized, being redeemed. There are ballads of murder, lost love, jealousy, and all sorts of rank human emotion reflected in the surface of the water. Respect, praise, and worship of the river are other themes often channeled through music as well. Even in the realm of ambient music, digital mimesis of the aquatic is commonplace. Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, in their ongoing archaeological approach to a post-industrial sound design, offers their own variant on this topic with considerable differences. It is not only the sediment, the debris, the waste, the scum, the mud, and the rot that are the source materials in Scaath Catfish, but also what is preserved in those elements and new forms of life fostered in this conceptual framework.
Generally known as an ambient minimalist, utilizing synthesizers for most of his work, this time M. Griffin took advantage of "real world" sounds, captured with binaural microphones using a portable digital audio recorder. For this release, Griffin built up collages of numerous location recording elements, including cars driving on freeways, people walking in long echoing hallways, the ocean waves in Kona at night, a metalworking factory with heavy machinery crunching away, distant trains, and clothes driers. These elements were manipulated, combined, worked-on and re-worked, and overlaid with looped spoken elements later created by Griffin in the studio. The end result comes out something like the Zoviet France soundtrack to a David Lynch film, that is, a dark and dream-like collage of loops, spoken fragments, disembodied whispers, and the echo of far-off machinery.
For the first time on vinyl; two super rare 1980-82 tapes by Two Daughters; a near-mythical, Throbbing Gristle/Industrial Records - affiliated duo who recorded glossolalic hymns, spectral percussive rituals and Bowie cut-ups in Brixton, c.1980-1982 for Nurse With Wound's United Dairies. A huge recommendation if you're into Dome, Zoviet France, O Yuki Conjugate, Panda Bear, NWW, Early Current 93 - what a find!
Virgin's fourth Ambient volume is the first of all-new material from contemporary artists, and it provides the most highlights of any in the series. Tracks from a score of crucial new-ambient producers, including Aphex Twin, Seefeel, O'Rang, EAR, Main, Final, Lull, Labradford, Techno Animal, Scorn and Paul Schütze. Seeing as each track is available only on this collection, it became the hardest-to-find of the entire series soon after its release.