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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”.
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