(2020) Anthéne - Collide


Review:
The gear Brad Deschamps uses to create his anthéne settings isn’t unique — many ambient producers work with synthesizer, guitar, field recordings, and laptop to create soundscapes — yet his music exudes an inordinately potent elegiac quality that identifies it as the handiwork of the Toronto-based musician. Testifying to his growing stature within the ambient community is the fact that his material appears not only on his own Polar Seas imprint but on other labels too, Ian Hawgood’s Home Normal a case in point. Collide makes for a lovely companion to weightless, the anthéne set Deschamps released on Home Normal in 2019. There’s a time-worn feel to the new release’s nine settings that imbues the material with a wistful character. That’s never more audible than during “last in line” when grainy atmospheric design and analog synth details transport the listener decades into the past. A yearning for earlier times also emerges during the meditative “versus” in its commingling of softly undulating drones and radiant synth flourishes. The music builds gradually, so subtly in fact that its majestic climax comes as a little bit of a surprise. That’s attributable in part to the deft transitions Deschamps executes so seamlessly during the piece’s development. While collide is stylistically cohesive, sound design treatments separate one track from another. Whereas “twelve miles” plays like a soft, shimmering exhalation stretched across six minutes, the stately, becalmed meditation “succession” is punctuated by a presumably guitar-generated, shoegaze-like texture. With “matter of fact,” the music achieves a stirring level of grandeur, even if quietly; “reservoir” and “light shade” are slow-burning, symphonic, and dramatic. Mastered with care by Hawgood, the release amounts to forty-five minutes of state-of-the-art ambient, and anyone questioning the genre’s capacity for emotional expressivity could well be convinced otherwise upon exposure to it.





Tracklist:
01 - Inflorescence
02 - Versus
03 - Twelve Miles
04 - Succession
05 - Reservoir
06 - Matter of Fact
07 - Last in Line
08 - Collide
09 - Light Shade


Media Report:
Genre: ambient
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits