Robot Music

2008, Ghostly International.  Ambient seems to be enjoying a resurgence in popularity, in no small part I’m sure by Kompakt’s “Pop Ambient” series.  I have the same complaint though about a lot of the new crop of ambient as I did with much of it in the early 90’s- too unstructured, absolutely no melody and it ends up feeling like the soundtrack to your coma.  Fortunately, The Sight Below do not fall into the coma camp.  Chill yes, but definitely enough going on to keep your eyes open and your mind active.  Some people call this “chill-out,” or “electronica,” both not untrue labels, but also not very descriptive of their sound.  This to my ears is classic ambient, harkening back to Instinct-era Terre Thaemlitz or the holy grail of 90’s ambient, Global Communication.  The first track, “At First Touch,” is a sublime piece that really sets the stage for the bulk of the album.  Thick layers of lush pads, drenched in reverb, float about in the ether, forming vague but beautiful deconstructed chord progressions,  held to earth only by the steady, rhythmic pulse of a deep, bassy, kick drum.  Indeed, wherever rhythm is used on this album, it is used minimally…the soft heartbeat of the kick drum, a muted high-hat here, a reverbed woodblock there.  In this way, they have much in common with Dial’s Pantha du Prince, relying almost entirely on the hypnotic swirl of dreamlike melodies and needing only the slightest rhythmic backbone, if any at all.  There are tracks such as “Already There,” that abandon rhythm alltogether, save for the soft pulse of synth pads moving below the main chords, drifting in and out of phase with each other.  It never gets the least bit boring.  Like their 1990’s contemporaries, Global Communication, The Sight Below have distilled the best elements of Ambient into a cohesive, gorgeous composition that bears repeating and repeating. -RM

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