For The Ambient Lovers...review and mixtape archive 001

Fescal - Alchemical Wanderings (Time Released Sound)

Debates free-flowing, profluent thought processing fails by straying too far, imparts in runabout ordinations with traits of humans. Our willingness and adaptability is reflected in phases. Familiarity unbreached remains vital to grafting absorbtion of information. This reactivates semblance. But subsequent subdivision of thought processing associated with work, not enjoyment, creates wandering moments. Here plenty, including those in the Ambient music community, take a leaf out of Autumn’s book. We profuse the breeze like a wilted shade of red – hearty motion can be lost. The leaf taken can park on a double yellow of haphazardness. Several, in certain respects, lose direction at a stage. But if things go right, alchemy is there like a shot that lights up the dark.

How do we create those alchemies? The bread landing butter side up, where taste slides together in untainted harmony? Fescal, a sound artist, graphic designer and photographer from South Korea, is said to be looking for the perfect formula. And Fescal understands a fragile truth of alchemy: it’s partly playing one element against the other. This affects the end result of interpretation from the source. So an external impetus behind “Alchemical Wanderings” is also reliance on linearity causing psyche walkabout. To Fescal’s internal credit, he’s supplanted a connective for this line of alchemy: as James Kirby put for an interview on “Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was", “to make less of a fast food style release”. Contrasting that subject’s grandiosity, Fescal maintains stylistic subtlety in length and feeling, letting the music wash over you like a well-needed shower. There’s no sudden moments, and the lightening of grace keeps “Alchemical Wanderings” from tee-totalling the murk of Hauntology, a sub category that unsettles to an extent instead of medicates.

Entirety of straightforwardness is also a continual characteristic of drone across decades. From your fridge hum to the forefront of Paul Bradley’s catalogue, drone is carefully handled in Fescal’s amplitudes. Fescal’s main counterbalance is a palatable transparency, seeing the layers as part of the whole, in a continuous 50 minute suite with little silence, all liquid hues and calming stewing. Resembling the space Ambient of Data Obscura parachuted to the more organic experiments of The Caretaker, intermingling chimes and electronic bleeps early on crumble a conundrum that alchemy is a time and patience exercise, as much as it is about making snap decisions, and acting on their consequences.

“The Beautiful Neurotic”, Fescal’s only other album, released on the aptly titled Camomille Music in 2010, was an even calmer affair in places, and it seems an affinity with morphing mandate of what’s usual for both artist, and alchemy of life’s mutations is a point of concern. The handing-down of the periodic tables’ elemental basis, where moodswings in humans catapult stability out of whack, is still shown in doctors getting medication doses wrong for their patients. For neurotics: declination to conforming to what’s inside the pill, or poison furnishes a loss of “alchemy” with the contracted subject matter. So to me a stone-set-ness of behaviour is the most fundamental alchemy we can hope for. As a pensive collection of drone and natural shades, “Alchemical Wanderings” happily sways amidst flow and full tube limit, balancing its compositional equation as effectively as an avid Ambient fan desires. Now we just need a solution for it selling all 100 limited edition copies, with hand stamped metallic tags, and a capped Pyrex test tube for each, containing some precious metals.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/03/fes...anderings/