Asher - Landscapes Elsewhere

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CNV R12

When is too little not enough? With “Landscapes Elsewhere”, Asher moves several steps away from his fine prior releases toward much more tonal territory. The question is whether he supplants this mollification factor with enough salt to retain the attention of listeners not so interested in elaborations on the Eno-esque. Well, yes and no.

There are four pieces, two of about 20 minutes bracketing another pair each a third that long. Though they are distinct, the casual listener could be forgiven if he thought that he was hearing four extracts from a single work. As near as I can determine, each consists of four elements (though there certainly may be more): the soft, staticky pops of vinyl at 33 1/3 rpm, rather muted field recordings involving water, avian and insectile sounds, a steady, generally high-pitched electronic drone and, most prominently, gentle tones that seem to have originated from an electric keyboard. “Gentle” is the key word here. The first three elements exist in a fairly steady state and, perhaps unfortunately, tend to be heard as background for the keyboard. You can mentally shift the layering if you exert some effort (at least, for me, it takes some effort) but the melodic quality of the tones makes it almost automatically read as foreground. Those notes exist in brief patterns that repeat with some exactitude although the spacing between notes is, I think, subtly varied, though that may be a perception influenced by shifts in the other elements. Aside from that possible cranial exercise, you pretty much grasp the “whole” within a few minutes and one’s enjoyment derives from how much beauty one can extract from the appreciation of the balance and interaction of the various sounds, the sort of thing that brings to mind more differentiated antecedents like “Music for Airports”.

But there’s something else, a quality of all good ambient music. After a while—for myself about when the last track begins—you can manage to drop all these activities and just bathe in the sounds, the atmosphere Asher may have been striving to attain all along suddenly becoming apparent. Maybe it’s just because the melodic line in this track contains a tantalizing hesitation before resolving and that it, somehow, meshes with the rest of the sounds in a more natural, complicated manner. Hard to say. I’m curious to see if Asher continues in this direction. As it stands, listeners who have enjoyed his previous work should probably hear this one as well, even at the risk of getting a little less out of it. Newcomers, especially those coming in from “harder” eai, might be better served with prior recordings.

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