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Except for a brief revival during the mid-nineties, real ambient has always been a rather marginal sub genre within EM. However, it has it’s own icons, like for instance Brian Eno, Steve Roach and John Serrie, to name but a few. Many EM aficionados tend to neglect ambient, because they think there is not much going on in this music. Besides the fact that this is just what ambient is all about, I think that they are wrong in most cases. Of course there is enough rubbish to be found, but true lovers can, from the top of their head, name a lot of artists that deserve to be rescued from relative obscurity. One of them is Dutchman Matthew Florianz. As far as I’ve been able to find out from his well designed website, he has been releasing his beautiful, panoramic and quiet ambient under different names (including Liquid Morphine) since 1995. Sometimes on cd-r, mostly in very limited editions, so his oldest fans are most likely the only people to have all his collected works in their possession. Fortunately there are plans for re-releases of older work, but so far no dates are known.
'GrijsGebied' [GreyArea] from 2001 is the musical prolongation of his most recent stunner 'The Tone T(h)ree' (released in 2004, but recorded in 2000). On 'GrijsGebied' Matthew Florianz introduces a world full of warm, dark colors, and vague images, in which you can get pleasantly lost. The tracks unwind slowly, and at first they may sound rather static. But a closer listen reveals a large number of layers that whirl around each other like moths in the evening shade. Here you get immensely beautiful soundscapes, which slowly pass before your inner eye. The colors are a bit paler, and the atmosphere is a bit thinner than on 'The Tone T(h)ree', but there is no sign of eeriness whatsoever. Despite the fact that this music sounds very spacey, it has a very down-to-earth character. Perhaps because there is no coquette with extraterrestrial themes whatsoever.
Where 'The Tone T(h)ree' leaves every possible association up to the listener, with titles like ‘part 1’, ‘part 2’, etcetera, on 'Grijsgebied', Florianz takes you by the hand a bit more on your journey through his fairy-like universe. There is enough that you can still imagine by yourself, but titles like ‘schaduwrijk’, ‘glaswind’, ‘maalstroom’ and ‘nakalm’ (sorry, these are in Dutch, they roughly translate as ‘shadowrealm’, ‘glasswind’, ‘vortex’, and ‘aftercalm’) are at least alienating. In my opinion, individual reviews of the separate tracks are useless, because I think you should ‘read’ this ‘sound story’ from cover to cover in one go. The real fan gets comfortably submerged in a cool bath full of distant sounds and hidden depths for exactly 68 minutes. Very transporting and associative stuff. This is a masterpiece of contemporary ambient, and receives a full score of five stars. Well deserved!
On a final note (to convince even the last doubters) there’s this: One of the biggest mistakes an ambient artist can make is to not make his music develop. A ten-minute tone remains a ten-minute tone when there is no (minimal) shift in frequency or intermodulation-invoked rhythm. By that I mean that some frequencies can interfere in such a way that a rhythmic structure develops in over- and undertones. When that happens, the physical presence of percussion is not needed. Once again, this works out great on this album. While there is no information at all about what instruments were used, I suspect that Florianz has a relatively small hardware setup (I know about a Korg o5r/w), and that he has full control over it. And I think the studio was used as a huge supplementary instrument as well. On his beautiful website you can find lots of interesting information, and even some exclusive music for downloading.
Rating: 5 STARS | (MY CHOICE AWARD) | Max Delissen
E-dition Magazine
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