Review of The Endless Change Of Colour [12k1074]

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A fortyseven minutes lasting one-track album by German ambient producer Marsen Juhls, mostly known as Marsen Jules, Falter and Krill.Minima, which has been titled “The Endless Change Of Colour”, could be easily considered as a sort of suite for contemplation of those led lamps which gradually cast different colours. Its very slow graceful and intrinsically sumptuously somber movement could corroborate such an assumption, but if you consider the manner of playing and the imaginary vector followed by this refined chiselor of frequencies this release seems one of the last phase of an implosive process which seemingly seized his sound since his last release “Nostalgia” on Oktaf. The entire suite has been moulded from the elongation of three overstretched audio streams taken from a single phrase of an old jazz record. Marsen explains the underlying process by his own words: “These streams are transformed into loops which break the original instrumentation down into sound resembling pure waves, harmonics and overtones. These loops play to different time signatures to create phasing patterns that continuously move and dance around each other in a constantly-evolving lattice of sound. Despite it being based on a very strict and limited set of rules the music could, in theory, be endless and ever-changing”. Such a compositional process results into a daydreaming and entrancing listening experience which could be easily associated to the generative ambient works by Brian Eno or the emotional dilutions by William Basinski, but you could even imagine it as the possibly missing fourth part of “Somnium”, the hypnagogic masterpiece by Robert Rich. If you manage to cope with the subtly hypnotic mickey-like effect by sharpening your eardrums, more trained listeners will easily enjoy the fineness of almost undetectable sonic variations of this beguiling lulling suite.

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