With regard to ambient music, it can seem that looking is as important a part of the experience as listening. The details become meaningful as they drain into the visual world, saturating it. The effect is uniquely powerful outdoors, as though the music, having been extracted from nature, replenishes its intensity. The sky seems bluer and more finely graded, uniquely composed against the dark treetops. You feel a significance in a lone contrail, a cosmic purpose in a pattern of light and shade. Ambient musicians have diligently reinforced these visual associations, shoring up abstract flutters and waves with sturdy images of mountains, forests, seas, and stars.
This is why Billow Observatory may be the perfect ambient band name, arranging the indifferent sky in proportion to the solitary witness who gives it meaning. The duo's long-gestating debut easily calls to mind drenching sunrises, glittering constellations, and sailing clouds, richly furnishing the familiar sense of hovering over vast natural orders that you're also inside. But while the music is effective and finely wrought, it's slightly checked by the same schematic feel as the group's name. Mannered, well-balanced gloriousness doesn't allow much room for surprise, and pat postcard vistas start to intrude before the album exhausts its considerable length.
Billow Observatory is Jonas Munk, who records ambient glitch music as Manual, and Jason Kolb, guitarist for the shoegaze band Auburn Lull. Reportedly, this record is the result of years of online audio file swapping, and it shows in a compulsive lack of stray hairs; an obsessive attention to proportion and timbre. It was created largely with analog sources and electric guitars, recorded live and then processed into glowing smears, periodic spasms of rhythm, filaments of texture. Only rarely, notably on "Ambros", does anything like the liquid shredding of Fripp and Eno's seminal ambient guitar music emerge. The guitar processing more resembles Fennesz or Stars of the Lid, refracting minimal harmonic material through a tonal prism.
The music is often pillowy and edgeless, with even its handful of rougher textures yoked into a slow, interpenetrating tumble. Soft bass and a metallic twist play through the high, mottled drone of "Slow Billows", depth-charges seem to boom through the unusually bracing "Dim Language", and "Helsinki Radio" takes a fine comb to the tonality and grain of, you guessed it, static. More often, we get subtle variations on certain durable timbres, such as the heavenly chorus pouring through the clouds of "Calumet" or the faux-strings-and-winds of "Pankalia".
You have to mill down the over-familiar language to hear the standouts, such as "Kronstadt", which has an enchanting feel of slowed down, staggered plainsong. But passages of quiet inspiration are diluted by inundation. After working on it for so long, you can understand why Munk and Kolb overstuffed the record, but it might have benefitted from losing the excessively long, three-part "Bilocation" suite at the end-- at least if the second part didn't bring a welcome rhythmic jolt to the placid motion. I'm left wondering if ambient music's connection to nature has become simply reflexive. There is something hall-of-mirrors-like about it: stars actually do make sounds, which resemble the ones ambient musicians synthesize for looking at stars. One starts to yearn for a break in the circuit. Long, revolving tones make for easy cosmic or biospheric allegories, but with a little more daring and imagination, couldn't they conjure all kinds of other things as well?
