Skip to main content

Ambient: Darren McClure - On Opposites (2019)

73 / 100
The album is uneven but rewarding if approached selectively.
From Los Angeles, I travel to Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture to visit Darren McClure, who was previously based in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland. Well, it doesn’t really matter whether that is his current location or not—what matters is the music, right?

Because I was busy with Ablaze My Sorrow on January 1 and 2, then with 7328 on the following day, my mind drifted back to the grand idea of reviewing releases in alphabetical order. After numbers, A, then B, it should be C, right? Instead, I jumped straight to D—but that should be forgivable. Hopefully after this I can finish Chiodata before the 6th arrives.

I picked On Opposites, released on July 17, 2019—three days before the Dravier album I reviewed—and obtained it via Neotantra. Since I moved directly to this release, it felt like I was being treated to ambient music that met my expectations again after the slight detour of the previous review.

The flowing ambient textures, combined with prominent piano on “Strange Slip in Time,” genuinely touch the soul, even though the opening track “Archival Sketch” merely sounds like a poorly executed loop used as a hook. The sense of comfort is disrupted again in “Reflecting” by a sensor-like sound that appears throughout the track. “Blurred Lens” reinforces this discomfort with sharp, synthetic tones, evoking the feeling of a night spent in a dark corner of the city. “Charmonia” is actually rather noisy as well, but more in a space-like drift, making it less disturbing. Meanwhile, “Snow Lapse” makes the most striking use of field recordings, featuring a cold, dungeon-synth-like touch that suits its title quite well.

So, as usual, I will only take the purely ambient tracks or those closer to new age/cinematic territory rather than ones leaning toward dark ambient. Fans of Steve Roach and Rojinski, or anyone who enjoys ambient and dark ambient coexisting within a single release, can give Darren McClure’s work a try.

Best tracks: “Strange Slip in Time,” “Slow Juno,” “On Opposites,” “Otaru Box”.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Terima kasih telah berkomentar. Usahakan untuk menjaga sopan santun.

Popular posts from this blog

Breakcore: Subheroine - End. (2025)

77 / 100 End. is Subheroine ’s most immersive and emotionally textured work yet ... Is being a week late enough to make a new release feel cold and stale? Maybe it’s the effect of our fast-paced modern world and the FOMO trend. Who knows. Whatever. Alright then, let’s welcome a new breakcore/drum & bass album (though it runs under 30 minutes) from Subheroine : End. ! End. by SUBHEROINE Released just on November 7 via Japan’s veteran breakcore label, Lost Frog Productions , End . delivers a noticeably more atmospheric vibe this time. So, tagging it as atmospheric drum & bass makes perfect sense, while the “depressive” tag seems to apply only to the cover art. But is that really the case? As always, there are surprises when reviewing music—those unexpected moments that make certain tracks sound more intriguing than expected. The most prominent depressive elements appear in the sampled voice of an anime girl sounding shocked or weakened in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Soundtrack: Dragica Kahlina - Ava Chapter 1 OST (2022)

78 / 100 A compelling dark ambient soundtrack , best enjoyed by fans of atmospheric and cosmic soundscapes rather than traditional game OST seekers. Ava is a mobile puzzle game inspired by tarot cards , developed by Stardust LLC . It was released in four chapters, rolled out periodically between February 2020 and the first quarter of 2021. While there’s a claim that the game won an award, it was never explained exactly where or what it won. For the soundtrack of Chapter 1, Stardust LLC collaborated with local, Zurich-based artist Dragica Kahlina . Ava Chapter 1 OST by Dragica Kahlina Although the game came out in 2020, Kahlina only uploaded the OST two years later on Bandcamp , using cover art from Level 11: The Crown that features Ava herself. The atmosphere of darkness and cosmic vastness is strongly felt throughout the eleven tracks, built primarily on dark ambient foundations and layered with various sounds: echoing stick-like noises...
Post a Comment
Read more

Avant-Garde: 1024756 - Dead Star Escape (2022)

65 / 100 A dense and dizzying journey into experimental and avant-garde territory, Dead Star Escape trades conventional structure for abstract textures and jazz-inflected grooves, shifting far from 1024756 ’s earlier hip-hop/soul leanings. Best suited for listeners who crave disorienting, free-form soundscapes rather than playlist-friendly tracks. Dead Star Escape is yet another abstract single from Brisbane , Australia’s experimental/avant-garde project 1024756 , even though neither genre tag appears on their Bandcamp page. Released on May 5, 2022, this track marks the artist’s second single. AUM173.3 - DEAD STAR ESCAPE by 1024756 Running for seven minutes, the song opens with the roar of machinery from a synth drifting in outer space, layered with the hum of alien waves. This slowly transforms into avant-garde rock territory, driven by drums and bass, with an array of keyboards and synths in a jazz-like manner, though notably without an...
Post a Comment
Read more