The style of ambient techno that Wolfgang Voigt (Gas, Burger/Ink) minted has proved to be massively influential. It gave us the Field, who leans heavily on the techno side of the Gas aesthetic, arranging pithy scraps of musical information into deathless pulsations. It also gives us Seattle's the Sight Below, a mirror image of the Field. Burying the thump and emphasizing the ambiance, Glider could have been marketed as a lost Gas album while raising only the most initiated eyebrows. It's a cunning facsimile, but a facsimile nonetheless. Luckily, Glider gets by just fine on the sensual pleasure of Voigt's style.
And there is a key distinction: While Voigt worked mostly with samples, the Sight Below creates his tracks with autonomously generated sounds. Running a guitar through a variety of looping, reverb, and delay stations, he uses the E-bow, the slide, and tentative picking techniques to circumvent the physical essence of the strings and to marshal clouds of edgeless tone. Only the 4/4 drum tracks-- consisting of cymbal snips, crisp snares, and hypnotic bass bumps-- keep these translucent songs from floating away.
The Sight Below's emphasis on melodic and rhythmic regularity makes his music serene and contemplative; it also creates a limitation. This is largely static work, with very little by way of build or release. Ideas presented near the beginning of each track tend to vary only cosmetically, then peter out. Some songs are extremely abstract: On "At First Touch", a continuous sub-tone breathes out long, celestial resonances for a few minutes, then gently rocks to a stop. The gusty, towering "Without Motion" describes itself accurately. The tracks where palpable textures are admitted tend, naturally, to be more engaging. On "Dour", fragments of discernible guitar glint through the streaming haze; on "Life's Fading Light", they seem to pull backwards against the pneumatic beat and atmospheric hum.
Glider 's derivativeness and inertia put a cap on its capacity to astonish, but it has a protracted shelf life. It's consummate mood music, which goes a long way toward compensating for its shortcomings. And the more I listen, the more esoteric divergences from Gas I start to perceive-- a different personality shining through, aloof and expansively pensive. Voigt alleged that he wanted to "bring the forest to the disco"-- the Sight Below lines up behind the velvet rope arm-in-arm with the sky.
