Ambient Sunday is focusing on the guitar this morning. Both artists – elskavon, and Tistan Welch – use guitar in their tracks. Sometimes clearly and sometimes a bit more hidden away. Sit back. Relax. Press play.
elskavon is Chris Bartels from Minneapolis. The track is River (Blue) from his forthcoming Patience EP. It’s a lovely, almost folktronica, track that lets the guitar be plucked gently and wander free. The surround is an IDM treasure trove of organic sounds offering a jittery, clattery, bobbling, babbling brook of sound. He says, “On this track, I used lots of recordings captured in Duluth last year – my friend went up to the area for a day and recorded all sorts of percussive sounds and textures – rocks, water, wood, metal, leaves – anything we could find.” It’s all machine and all organic simultaneously. And awfully cute.
Soundcloud
Spotify
Bit of concentration required with this one. Tristan Welch is, “a musician, artist and activist based in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area.” His work is mainly creating soundscapes via electric guitar, treated with electronics. And that’s what you get here, spread across eleven minutes of sound.
Asset / Defect is an ambient drone piece but manages not to be too ‘droney’. It’s more waves of intermingling sound that come, pause, and retreat. You’d not really know there were guitars in here. It’s all been processed around. As a person in recovery, the title of the piece comes from the reckoning of positive and negative personality elements. As such the piece is a very inward looking one. The overall slow vibration of sound encourages a kind of contemplative or meditative air but with a hint of fuzziness that all is not well. A little oasis of near calm in an otherwise noisy over-stimulated world.
Bandcamp (CD available)
Spotify