Cologne's Jens-Uwe Beyer has a thing for big statements: His 2012 recording Red Book drew out a single, unbroken techno groove to nearly 80 minutes—a metaphorical "journey by DJ" that could, in fact, accompany a moderately lengthy journey, or at the least one hell of a commute. But he's equally a fan of far more modest statements. Since 2005, his annual contributions to Kompakt's Pop Ambient series have typically taken the form of bite-sized reflections on a single mood, texture, or tone. Now, on The Emissary, he strikes a balance between these approaches. It is an invitation for the listener to travel but as travelogues go, The Emissary features no panoramic views, no grand vistas, no monuments, no scenes of splendor. It's more of a soothing blur flashing past, as seen from a comfortable seat aboard the bullet train.
There are two principal modes at work across the album's nine tracks: pulse and echo. "It Started on Wednesday" uses both at once, and it's serene to the point of detachment, in which patient bass notes dissolve into reverb trails so thick you could smear them with a putty knife. In "Moonshine Tangerine", quarter-note taps are fed through filters and delay, gradually building up into interlocking shapes with a debt to Robert Hood's brand of ultra-minimal techno, but drum-free and dew-bubbled. "The Life Of" also brings to mind techno rendered in water droplets.
The pulse-oriented productions aren't always so regular, however. The opening "St. Pop" is comprised of short, monophonic synthesizer bursts, first fast then slow then fast again; they suggest neurons firing in some post-cryogenic scenario, and they feel both melancholy and slightly numb. In "Hands", a three-note piano figure reminiscent of new age pianist George Winston runs in unsteady cycles, its shifting accents conveying a simultaneous sense of stillness and movement. The same goes for "Water Dancer", a duet for looped guitar and sloshing waves that evokes Grouper's method of traveling without moving. The remainder of the album is more placid—"About Turn" hangs glowing in the air like a fog that veils the sun, while "Trip the Light Fantastic" slows a sense of ecstatic wonder to a deathbed crawl with a minute-long fadeout.
These tracks aren't terribly sophisticated; as per Kompakt's Pop Ambient dictate, the album is content to take a pretty simple idea—ambient music as comfort food—and stretch it as far as it can. But there are also promising signs that Beyer isn't quite content to leave things there. As "Moonshine Tangerine" fades out, a scrappy guitar figure, run through tremolo, pops up from out of nowhere, and the same thing happens at the end of "The Emissary", this time with a tentative little piano prelude that runs for nine-and-a-half bars and then breaks off, silenced by a sigh in the background. These codas feel like riddles, hints of wormholes to other worlds that lie just out of reach of the album's sheltering ambient cocoon. They're reminders, maybe, that every journey is also the story of a journey not taken—teasing snapshots of the world beyond the train's windows as it comes fleetingly to rest.
