Review Summary: If this is lost, I don't want to be found.
My history with collages is more dramatic than it should be. At eight years old I was tasked to do a collage for school. I cried. The same brain my parents worried might be a little too far along the autistic spectrum could not handle the idea of creating a deliberately imperfect representation of something else. It was, my eight-year-old self thought, highly illogical: belonging to the same category of incomprehensible thinking that gave Skeletor muscles. He can't have muscles; he is a skeleton. Which troglodyte *** decided he should have muscles?
Obviously a fair bit has changed. Not as much as I'd have hoped, but a collage no longer triggers a mental breakdown. In fact, I quite like them. They have character - rugged, asymmetrical, off-key character. The individual parts hold stories far richer than a brush stroke, and as such the whole image, imperfect as it is, might actually be better. The same applies to music: if you can make a melody from vocal moans instead of synthesised sounds, why shouldn't you? In this age of aesthetic saturation it is different, and different is good. And as the endless wash of ambient drone begins to lose its flavour, it soon becomes clear that electroacoustic is king.
Benjamin Finger belongs to the semi-recent surge of ambient musicians playing around with more rhythmic, textured structures and light experimental sampling. Spheruleus'
Peripheres, also on Eilean Records, is a great example of the unique mood rhythm can offer, and while the best are too cautious to follow the Chris Watson route of sample fetisisation, recent albums by Ashlar and Caught in the Wake Forever would not be nearly as good without their textured electroacoustic canvases.
Finger chooses to structure his compositions around the cavernous boom of a piano interior. Abstract aural forms will slink around the edges, sometimes distinct sample cuts but more often than not just moulded waves of leftover noise, or more tangible orchestrated sections will intervene. Within this space, variation is made easy. The moody, string-laden “Phony Disaster of Laziness” makes the transition into the far more caring title track without so much as pausing for breath: slipping out of that squeaky tension for the dreamy gasp of vocal sighs and woozy mechanical hums. The ever present piano rhythm will continue to plod along in the background, and becomes a constant companion in these surreal soundscapes.
At times, a passing note is made to Finger's equally surreal but more fantastical and often abrasive past. “Diamond Earth” and “Once Upon Her” especially, which carry enough distortion to threaten to crumble the piano completely, but gradually settle into a contented aftermath.
Pleasurably Lost is not a complete departure from the more excitable scenes of last year's
The Bet and other works, but there's a maturity that sees Finger relax into a slightly more mellow approach.
My personal acceptance of the existence of collages, as silly as it seems, reflects the attitudes of an entire genre. How do you continue to make interesting music when so much has been made and so many are making it?
Pleasurably Lost is part of the answer: dive into the kind of abstract surrealism that can only come from careful electroacoustic tinkering. The results can be intimidating, but for those too familiar with the status quo to find the same-old exciting, a rewarding challenge is more than welcome.
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