Off Land: Blue Narration

I am really enjoying stuff from en:peg digital not only because they have decent selection of music but every release is a mere 2 bucks so I can really listen to new artists without feeling like I made a bad purchase. "Off Land" is no exception to their catalog of artists. The first track "Fog" really sets the tone. (This is, by far, the best track on the album). He utilizes a lot of the organic feel of artists like "Biosphere", yet he still spends time with melody and let the sound of their synths actually stay sounding like synths (like early "Ambient Instinct" artists). The second track "Contrails"'s main pad has almost a soft horn quality to it without sounding too cheesy. In the background, throughout the album, you can hear ambient nature noises such as birds. Let me just say that I really don't know what to feel about sounds of birds in the background of ambient music... maybe slightly a little too cliche for my tastes. The third track "Kites" has a very 80s sci-fi synth feel to it (with more birds in the background (I don't get what a sci-fi feel and bird sounds have in common)!!!). This album is a nice listen for those who really love the late 80s to mid 90s electric ambient artists such as "Human Mesh Dance" and "Global Communication". With that said, don't expect anything to innovative or mind blowing. The artist also need to focus more on his main theme... the nature sounds with the cold synthy feel (albeit nice and relaxing) does not go together thematically very well. In my opinion; if the artists wanted an ambient backdrop noise to fill up the space... they could have chose maybe some nice noise generated rhythms like other artists are doing to fill that void and keep the overall tone the same. It has all the characteristics to make it a good ambient album (and mostly, it is), but the varying ambient textures fight against eachother and make it slightly distracting (which goes against Eno's criteria for ambient music (non distracting)).

» album @ en:peg digital
raquo; artist profile @ last.fm