Bass Communion - Continuum

All Music Guide

If you thought ambient music was boring, wait till you try microscopic ambient music it's just like ambient only more minimal On the other hand, if you have a taste for the subtle, the dark and the textural, and if you don't need melodies, beats or chord progressions to hold your attention, then you may well find yourself captivated by the latest project of Steven Wilson, who records under the names Bass Communion, Porcupine Tree and Blackfield. For the first volume in what is planned to be a long series of recordings, all apparently titled Continuum, Wilson has teamed up with a fellow experimentalist who goes by the name VidnaObmana to create three 20minutelong excursions into barelythere ambience, most of it morose and deeply minimalistic. "Construct 1" is little more than a keyboard drone that changes pitch every once in a while; "Construct 2" is much more complex and multilayered, but also airy and just a bit spooky tone clusters and faraway echoes of twanging bass strings float ...around wispily before evaporating in front of your face. "Construct 3" is somewhere between the two, an almost subliminally quiet mutter that slowly grows into a dark dreamscape punctuated with the sounds of robotic crickets. The packaging is meant to be an integral part of the artistic experience: the disc comes in an oversized digipack with three postcardlike inserts, all of them illustrated by photographer and painter Lasse Hoile. Like David Thomas says: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like. - Rick Anderson, All Music Guide Read more Less