New records by M83 are big events not only in the sense that their unrelenting cinematic grandeur seems built with IMAX in mind, but also in that they're generally met with wide-eyed anticipation. So it's weird that Digital Shades Vol. 1 slipped onto the market with so little fanfare. There is a nice symmetry to it, though: Reduced fanfare is what this record is all about.
Ambient music is one of M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez's formative influences, and you can hear traces of it in his music-- especially on "Unrecorded" or "In Church" from 2003's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. The funny thing is that M83, in general, is the antithesis of ambient music: The latter slips into the background; the former saturates the foreground. But on the first volume of his Digital Shades series, which serves to document his ambient recordings, the maximalist composer attempts to get back to his minimal roots.
Brian Eno, ambient music's definitive figure, is a self-professed influence of Gonzalez's, and his mark is all over this album. It's impossible to hear broad piano figures plinking in a deep field of tone without being reminded of Eno's pacesetting Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a record that even came with its own manifesto: "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
By Eno's definition, Digital Shades Vol. 1 is ambient only in the most literal sense: sound fills the air. The interpretative openness Eno stresses is absent from the record, which can be pretty handily interpreted in one way: It's an M83 album without the pummeling percussion. If purely ambient music is like sand slipping through your fingers, felt but ungraspable, Digital Shades is more like a rope sliding through your palm, laced with friction where the music hijacks your attention. "Coloring the Void" opens with an angelic chorale, a retiring guitar figure chiming in the background, and Gonzalez's muffled soft rock vocals-- all of which will be immediately familiar to M83 fans. Beyond the humming tone that wreathes it all, it's just M83 on muscle relaxers.
The compositions build organically, but they lack the mystery of pure ambient music, the sense of not knowing how you got from one place to another, and the womblike feeling of enclosure. The transitions are often too overstated-- and the short songs too fast-moving-- to induce that sort of subconscious hypnosis. On the eight-minute closer "The Highest Journey", scattered pianos gradually gather emphasis amid tense drones, eventually blissing out in a way that's satisfying but utterly predictable. But the album's iffy classification does nothing to dilute its pleasures, and only the most prescriptive ambient music fans will balk-- on balance, the record brims with ambient signifiers. There are field recordings of waves and birdsong, lots of efflorescent long tones, vaguely new-age song titles that suggest a naturalistic mysticism, and the usual sky, snow, and sea imagery.
In the end, the album's aura of inessentiality becomes an asset-- a pleasant contrast to M83's usual momentous impact. The songs are big by ambient standards, but tiny by Gonzalez's. All of M83's work is mood music, but the mood is usually one of passion and intensity, which can occasionally be a bit enervating. For those who crave the M83 sound but feel too nervy for all the pageantry, this is a perfect fit: grand and beautiful, but also retiring and relaxing. It's an X-ray view of the skeleton that tends to disappear under Gonzalez's percussive muscle, and a promising teaser for the next proper M83 album.
