Sunset Mission

 

11 degrees, rain, a cloudy sky, a cold, unpleasant wind: 3 days before the start of the European Football Championship in Germany, June appeared as if October/November were its best friend. Definitely not something I would find funny. 

Unprepared, the only thing that comes to mind quickly is Lynch'esqe Twin Peaks Dark Jazz by Bohren & the Club Of Gore to suitably face the day.

“Sunset Mission” is so beautiful that making tea is almost fun.

„Dark gloomy and very atmospheric noir jazz/ambient, played at doom metal pace. The perfect album to play in solitude while walking through a city late at night.

The grimly titled ‘Bohren & der Club of Gore’ was formed in 1992 by members of hardcore bands with names like ‘Chronical Diarrhoea’ and ‘Macabre Farmhouse’. With this background, you may expect Bohren to follow in a similar pattern of playing incredibly fast and vicious punk or metal. 

What the band actually do though is move all the way to the other extreme, playing a slowed down and incredibly sparse mixture of jazz and ambient. There is still a metal influence, but it’s the dark, gloomy and ponderous sound of doom metal, especially Black Sabbath, that Bohren draw from. With their third album, 2000’s Sunset Mission, Bohren move toward perfecting their noir jazz soundscapes, replacing the guitar of the first two albums with a tenor saxophone.

This fusion of jazz and ambient played at a snail-pace works incredibly well, perfectly creating an impressively dark and haunting mood. The music is always tense and edgy despite being so mellow because of it‘s unpredictable melodies, which is what makes it so enjoyable to listen to. Sunset Mission is the perfect album to play in solitude while walking through a city late at night because of the perfect noir atmosphere. It is not music you can listen to at any time, but when in the right mood it works perfectly. The songs, all instrumental, flow into each other perfectly so it is easy to get drawn in to the atmosphere.

The songs, ranging from 5 to nearly 17 minutes in length are centred on seemingly never ending double-bass lines. While this may sound dull, it is actually one of the reason’s the music works so well. The bass-lines are all gripping and totally hypnotic with just enough subtle changes to stop them from becoming stale but not quite enough to break the trance-like feel that is so easy to get totally lost in. The slow pace puts emphasis on every single bass note, making each one sound just as powerful as the last. The drumming is equally as restrained, though while the often simple and sparse drumming is usually played very gently with brushes it is equally as gripping as the bass, creating much of the music’s tension. With the exception of some rising cymbals that add even more to this tension, the drumming is never that loud, staying in the background for most of the music.

The real highlight of Sunset Mission though, is Christoph Clöser’s fantastic saxophone playing, which sadly loses some of it’s importance in Bohren’s later albums. The rich emotional sax fades in at just the right moments before the music starts getting at all boring, playing unpredictable slow-motion melodies that sound totally improvised and always interesting. The piano plays equally unpredictably throughout, sometimes weaving between the slow saxophone at a much faster pace than everything else to add some excitement to the music and sometimes remaining as laid-back as the rest of the music, with each note left echoing for what seems like an eternity before the next.

The problem with Sunset Mission is that it only works if you’re in the right mood to listen to it. The extended song lengths and long running time of 1 hour 13 minutes can quickly get boring if you don’t get drawn in, and while the album flows with barely noticeable gaps between songs this can make the album sound samey as there isn’t a huge variety between each song. However, while it can definitely be a grower, taking several listens to fully appreciate, Sunset Mission is an excellent album that should appeal to any fan of jazz or ambient music and also even doom metal fans due to the uneasy gloomy doom-inspired atmosphere throughout.“

-Sputnik Music-

https://www.discogs.com/master/60848-Bohren-Der-Club-Of-Gore-Sunset-Mission

Space Age Lounge

 

Kim Cascone's "In a Garden of Eden", released under the moniker The Heavenly Music Corporation in 1993, would have suited me perfectly back then. Still lingering on the echoes of the second summer of love, this music designed for chill out rooms would have been exactly the balm for the soul that I needed. Well, it was 1993, FSOL's "Lifeforms" hadn't been released yet and there was still enough good music to satisfy my craving for ambient, ambient house & house. But the beats had already become harder everywhere, it was suddenly called rave and I increasingly missed the warmth and soul in “techno” music. Even the word techno sounded too cold to me.

But it wasn't until 2018 that I discovered this wonderful album through its re-release on the wonderful label Astral Industries (which deserves a post of its own just because of the fantastic artwork by Theo Ellsworth). HMC's third album was re-released there a year earlier. I don't understand why in this order. “Lunar Phase” also deserves its own post, later in this program.

„In 1989 Cascone became an assistant music editor for director David Lynch on „Twin Peaks“ and „Wild at Heart“. Musically he has used various aliases over the years but became best known under the moniker Heavenly Music Corporation, a name taken from a track on the record „No Pussyfooting by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp. Cascone released four full albums under this name from 1993 to 1996.“

„Originally realised at Cascone’s Silent studios in San Francisco for the Space Age Lounge, “a technomystical chill room in Goa, India”, his Heavenly Music Corporation debut is a typically balmy affair awash with tranquil synths and threaded with tropical field recordings to gently levitating effect.

It sounds very much of its time hearkening back to an era when phrases such as “technomystical chill room in Goa” were bandied around without irony, to a time of innocent MDMA experimentation and ISDN video links, right at the start of the internet, a utopian phase before it all went trip hop and everyone spent evenings waiting for webpages to load. Didgeridoos were very popular, too.

To be fair, you probably had to be there or else that period becomes a smudge of cliches as above, but it’s hard to fault the vibes and aura of Cascone’s recordings on ’In A Garden of Eden’. From the gentle swirl of cowbells and circular berthing synths in ‘Cloud Structure’, thru the patter of tropical rainfall in ‘Ambient To Be Here’, to the erotic gasps and ambient techno thump of the record’s title track and Steve Roach’s concluding acididgeridoo excursion, this album is pure paneer, but not without its nostalgic charms.“

-Boomkat-

„Not only is rhythm almost completely missing, but the instruments' drones are mixed with sounds of nature. This album will remain Cascone's most mature work. Organic, watery fluctuations and looping minimal synthesizer melodies (Cloud Structure Silence), stark cosmic landscapes à la early Klaus Schulze swept by icy electronic breezes (The Quiet Mind), suspenseful Steve Roach-y trances (Ambient To Be Here), pulsating Tangerine Dream-y quasar-rock (Dawn Chorus and Reentry, with Roach on didjeridoo) and even an intoxicating disco-raga (Beautiful Dream) represent a superb testament to what electronic music can do to the psyche, encompassing ambient, new age, psychedelic, progressive and world music. The 14-minute In A Garden Of Eden abuses of this technique, mixing water, animals, voices, exotic instruments and even a woman having an orgasm.“

-Piero Scaruffi-

https://www.discogs.com/release/12452982-Heavenly-Music-Corporation-In-A-Garden-Of-Eden