Edge-of-dusk drones built out of samples from old vinyl records and loops from mellotron, piano and more skulk their way through the bleak landscape of Gramophone Transmissions, the second release from Canadian artist Broken Harbour (aka Blake Gibson). The inside cover notes that “headphones and closed eyes provide the ideal listening environment for this recording.” I’d have to agree. As Gibson moves from slightly melodic–or perhaps melody-assisted is the right word–to sparse, near-isolationist drone-spaces, you’ll want to take in as much as you can.
Atmosphere and sonic texture are in full force here, dragging visceral reactions from you. In the opening track, “Drift,” mournful string sounds rasp a funereal cadence as light piano notes sprinkle across the frame. It’s about as light as the disc gets before Gibson starts to spiral down to bleaker zones. The two parts of the “The Ballad of Dave Bowman” make sure you understand that we’re done with anything but drone. The first is a stripped-down soundfield crackling with the static of a wayward transmission; the second builds off a drone with a pipe-organ feel, a steady, mildly swirling wash of sound that seems to pick up intensity as it curls around you.
They’re both chock full of activity compared to “Titan.” This is probably the starkest track on the disc. It reaches a very minimal point where the pads thin out and weaken and stretches of near-silence, where just a vinyl crackle fills the space, take over. The emptiness of it is quite affecting. Here, like nowhere else on the disc, Gibson conveys the sense that you are quite alone in this place. In “Dark Clouds Gathering in the West” Gibson hangs a pall of sound, a wavering expanse of pure grey, then layers it with eerie vocal wails. This track just gets more unsettling as it moves along–and there’s 12 minutes of it to get through. Gibson moves firmly into dark ambient territory with “Maelstrom (The Descent).” Here he just industrially grinds his way into your skull for over 15 minutes, overwhelming you with the sheer density of sound. It’s actually a fairly dynamic piece; for all its skull-corroding abrasiveness, it’s also got a fair degree of motion, albeit tectonic in speed. The disc closes with “Unforeseen Consequences,” where Gibson switches back to less edgy pads and drones. The tone is still shadowy and uncertain, but the feel is somewhat calmer.
By disc’s end you haven’t left Gibson’s desolate musical homeland; you’ve just crossed it, ready, perhaps to go again. Gramophone Transmissions will definitely appeal to the dark ambient crowd and will likely work well for those who appreciate drone–but anyone into beatless, atmospheric wanderings should have a go as well.
An excellent new release from a strong dark talent.
New music from Broken Harbour, a new twist on the space music ideal...
"Gramophone Transmissions" by Broken Harbour is an excellent release that builds on the concepts and themes of the space music genre by adding dark and unsettling elements that succeed in creating a new offshoot style. I'm not sure what to call it, perhaps that's something I can leave up to you as readers, but if you imagine "2001" as the archetypical space music movie, then "Alien" would surely be the movie to match with "Gramophone Transmissions"...
The album begins with "Drift", where the crackling sounds of uranium powered engines play overtop looped phrases in the distance, the occasional snatch of piano or a slowly rising pad filling out the space. It's a dense track, filled with deep sounds and tones that (appropriately enough) drift through the soundscape, rising and falling in focus and intensity. A really mesmerizing track, a really strong and engaging opening to the disc.
The two part suite "The Ballad of Dave Bowman pt. 1" follows, a soundtrack for the second most famous fictional astronaut after Major Tom. A slowly oscillating drone acts as the basis for this piece, a steady anchoring sound that shifts and pulls itself through it's own gravity. New
sounds are added gradually over the course of the track so as not to interupt or distract from the natural flow of the piece, instead complementing and building on it until eventually the drone is overtaken and replaced by a higher pitched sound that shifts the musical dynamic into a darker more ominous space.
"The Ballad of Dave Bowman pt.2" continues the journey with a brighter and slightly more inviting musical feel. The tones here are richer and fuller, a sweet cascade of bright tones that wash over the soundscape bringing with it a strong sense of renewal and hope.
Ironically "Titan" is a much more subtle track than its name would suggest, sparse and delicate
sounds playing over a bed of static and a slowly pulsing drone. I think it might well be my favourite track on the album, it's beauty lying in its quiet simplicity.
"Dark Clouds Approaching From The West" returns the listener to a darker space, a sound that brings to mind the Nostromo and other ill-fated ships. There's a building tension to this track, a feeling of unease that mounts as time passes, ultimately culminating in a truly harrowing listening experience. Haunted sounds, an ominous and intermittant breathing, a rising drone, it all adds up to create a really powerful environment, an impressive aural landscape.
So how do you follow that? "Maelstrom (The Descent)" ramps up the unease to 11 and then builds it up exponentially from there. I remember a radio program from my youth playing a recording taken from a mine that had supposedly breached some sort of dimensional barrier leading into Hell. My memory is that it sounded much like this track, only Broken Harbor has developed and built on the supposed sound of the underworld and made it all the more uncomfortable, all the more hellacious. A truly dark piece of music that impresses me greatly (but also leaves me a little scared at the same time).
"Unforeseen Consequences" closes the disc, a slightly brighter, but no less unsettling piece than the last two tracks. It's really a wonderful example of how similar moods and themes can be established while using completely different sound pallettes and approaches. A very interesting (and somewhat challenging) way to close the disc, "Unforeseen Consequences" finishes our journey, closing the loop musically and resolving any outstanding tensions and unease.
Like I said earlier, "Gramophone Transmissions" is an excellent album and an interesting stylistic development within the space music genre. It's also a truly impressive release that I highly recommend. Is it too early to start choosing my top ten picks for 2012?
I am always pleased when I see the artists develop their own sound during their career. Being stuck on some specific level doesn't make any good for anyone. I like to hear the transformation or at least the efforts for transformation. But I much more pleased to hear when the artist makes some progress and steps forward in exploring new boundaries of own creativity. Here I have the last album of Canadian resident Blake Gibson which can be a great example of that kind of a progress. When reviewing his previous album dated around 2009, I had this feeling that told me: "Here is the guy who is able to create something special". And as the time passed I can be sure today that I wasn't mistaken about him.
'Gramophone Transmissions' is the name that totally reflects the stuffing of the package while it was created around the scratching sound of an old vinyl. This kind of sound always associated to me with some gentle passion and a slight touch of nostalgia. In his second album Blake invites us to dive into the atmosphere of ruined civilization and nuclear holocaust, when the music fully created by non-synth sampled loops and drones. The opening track "Drift" welcomes us with a light, almost heavenly new age piano and orchestra structures, and truly drift it is with a soft touch of the wind and a worm stream of the sea. While drifting on the waves of sound, we arrive towards the second composition; "The Ballad of Dave Bowman pt.1" which grabs us into its gentle hands of the light atmosphere, where the time doesn't exists. Space continuum stops as soon as we transmitted into the second part of the same named track, base totally on the dense organ loops and the same light structures, guiding to the oblivion of ever existing memories. Nothing remains, everything drifts away, one can stop moving and breathing, because the sound of the ballad is the sound of the universe, where the human aspirations, ambitions, deeds and desires simply mean nothing compared to the wideness of never ending existence. Our journey comes towards "Titan", the biggest Saturn satellite, and due to that the music becomes darker and more static to open the second part of the album. The tracks transform to be gloomier with depressing atmosphere which doesn't lack its mysticism, becoming more and more hypnotic and even meditative as soon as we travel towards the very end.
As the result of the journey I can clearly state that Blake made a huge progress since his first efforts through the album 'Broken Harbour'. Once again, the second part of the cd loses a little bit of the power, amassed from the opening. But still remaining atmospheric, music kept me sunk inside its ambience to bring one huge piece of entertainment. Way to go Blake and hope to hear from you more compositions in the future brought from a frozen and chilly part of the globe.
"Gramophone Transmissions" is the second album by Broken Harbour, aka
Canadian ambient composer Blake Gibson, made without any use of synthetic sources. Recorded between July and October 2009, the release offers a fascinating, highly cinematic ambient travelogue of loops, drone and textural pads with a strong organic rim. According to the liner notes, the outcome was created from classical vinyl records beside choral, piano and mellotron recordings.
The flowing, non-rhythmic strings pads with smooth crackles journey through shaded, at times slightly ghostly landscapes were time and place seems to be of no importance. While we wander through the remote and expansive territory making up "Gramophone Transmissions", the first half turns out to be sounding more accessible, smoother and lighter.
Things turn lengthier, darker and more dense in the second half of the recording, starting with the beautiful alienating choral "Dark Clouds approaching from the West". This great minimal piece is the entrance to the 16-minute "Maelstrom (The Decent)", a halucinogenic/abstract trip down into the underworld, but a tad too adventurous for my ears. Fortunately, smooth drifting textural atmospheres and choral pads nicely return on the last piece "Unforeseen Conseqences", that incorporates a beautiful dynamic undercurrent.
All in all, "Gramophone Transmissions" is rather unusual but well-rendered ambient headphone music for those looking and cherishing the beauty hidden in remote expansiveness.
A special note on the stunning cd art work by Michal Karcz, that perfectly mirrors the mood and deep feel of the album’s introspective music.
Broken Harbour is an ambient project from Edmonton's Blake Gibson, with two self-released albums to date available through various digital outlets. The more recent, Gramophone Transmissions, is composed largely from samples after a growing dissatisfaction with synthesizers. His source material included classical music from worn-out vinyl, CDs and cassettes, as well as some recordings of his own on voice, piano, and, mellotron. Overlaid with a vinyl patina, Gramophone Transmissions mines the surreal territories somewhere between Leyland Kirby and William Basinski, evoking musical memory through harmonies sustained and overlapped, and melodies whose contours have been worn smooth from forgetfulness and decay.
The first half of the album sets the stage with long, slow pulses, The opening track " Drift" features a short, delicate, and elegant piano run, which gave it a sparkle, a twinkle of light. But the piano becomes a glimmer, hovering in distant chords as the album progresses inevitably to a darker, more nocturnal climate, an increasingly featureless audio plain constructed from low strings and cavernous reverberation. A last lingering appearance comes as a channel bell in "Titan", a repeated warning sounding through the fog, fraught with mythological overtones.
The album's second half, its three longest tracks, start with "Dark Clouds Approaching From The West," full of murk and distant rumbles, seeking the tension in the faraway twilight storms without ever finding a release. " Maelstrom"'s discordant voices will probably awaken anyone unwise enough to fall asleep to the previous lulling tracks. Its fleeting and wavering high strings introduce a slowly evolving series of shifting textures full of foreboding. The closer, "Unforeseen Consequences," hangs on a single sonority forever before returning to the quietly evolving moods of the earlier tracks.
There's a certain heft to the space used by Broken Harbour on Gramophone Transmissions. The new record by Canada's Blake Gibson explores the immensity of sound with crashing waves of it, generating an almost magnetic sensibility in the process.
Gramophone Transmissions was recorded betwor een July and October of 2009. Gibson, tired of synthesizers, used row upon row of samples fthe making of the album. The samples come from some unique territory, including well-worn vinyl records, chewed-up tapes, mellotron recordings, piano recordings, and so forth. After recording, the results went into a period of gestation that, according to Gibson, was to determine its readiness.
It's not every day that one comes across an artist so dedicated to his craft that he doesn't release something, but such is the nature of Broken Harbour. His self-titled debut came as a creation of form, one of silence and space and patience.
Gramophone Transmissions, too, is a record of fortitude, but it's also weightier stuff. The lack of synthetic sources makes the construction of sound a different beast entirely, but Gibson still holds to form well.
At just a touch over and hour, the album gets down to business right away. "Drift" is eight minutes that earn its namesake. The crackles and flaws in the transmission create substance, while the gossamer effects and instrumentalism rather recall the cool rise and fall of a sandy pipe organ.
Split into two parts is "The Ballad of Dave Bowman." The first part is woven gracefully, carrying the nomadic nature of the first track into a piece with somewhat more form. Choral and vocal samples ground it somewhat and the second part is like attending a peculiar church service in space, complete with organ (perhaps dusted off, at long last) and lovely sounds.
As Gramophone Transmissions heads into its second portion, the movements become more ominous. Broken Harbour means business with the aptly-titled "Maelstrom (The Descent)," a piece that thunders with a dense drone/doom crush.
With some lessons learned, Gibson's Gramophone Transmissions is an expansive and striking work of art. It is apparently the first in a series of "Transmissions" from Broken Harbour, so fans of true ambient/drone music would do well to tune in as soon as possible.
You can and should purchase Gramophone Transmissions, complete with beautiful Michal Karcz artwork, here.
Dark ambient have never been a genre where a lot of things happens. There were some years with a stable activity of the famous bands and formations, but it always was some kind of niche of industrial music for personal listening, where one could explore the inner world and sink into the depth of thoughts. Today it is not much happening at the specific scene, I can hardly count a dozen good albums that were out there during last two years. And of course there are really few newcomers, which dare to explore the world of abstractions. The complexity and the subjective form of feelings that are projected into this type of music, frequently withhold people from diving into processing it. But there are few guys here and there around the globe that are not scared of challenges, concealed inside dark ambient, and step eagerly to bring us the delights of the genre. I received recently two CD's from such a person, located somewhere in cold and frozen Canada, whose name is Blake and his project's name - Broken Harbour.
The music based mostly on a droning melody, and that element follows the album all the way. Distant waving sound welcomes me as I enter the void of Broken Harbour with the first track under the name "Beauty of Desolation p.1". The vision of dark plumbum sea grows stronger and stronger, as the waves wash a dead shore. Gloomy atmosphere drives me into the sonic landscape of dead and deserted world, supported by a deep hum of the wind, sweeping remainders of long gone civilization. Second track opens its gates with a totally depressing and slow piano melody, which adds a thickness and width to the overall feeling. The effect of an old vinyl scratches is added to strengthen the impression of decadence and decay. As the album moves forward, I came towards the third and in my opinion the best track of the album, in which some spoken samples are supported by sad atmospheric tunes to create a cosmic atmosphere of loss and sorrow. Two following tracks doesn't explore anything different from the previous, though in the last track, called "Monolith", some heavy machinery effects are added to bring a little bit diversity and strengthen more heavy ambience.
In general, not much happens inside the music, which is built with looping minimalistic sound. The structure can be better described not as ambient music, but a music ambience, more suitable for some kind of meditation during chilly Canadian winters. As soon as most tracks are very long, few of them seem to be overextended, and that fact makes them a little bit boring after 10-12 minutes of their run because of that looping concept. Here and there the effect of an old vinyl is added, which makes the album a little bit different from what I've heard before. But still, the feeling of deja vu presents during the entire album, when the memories of Lustmord, Oophoi and others are refreshed while listening to it. Though, Broken Harbour doesn't present anything new to the scene, he has a strong potential to become a member in the pantheon of the bands that bring delights for many years to the genre called dark ambient.
When I received my review copy of the untitled debut CD from Broken Harbour (aka Blake Gibson), it came with info telling me that the intent of the album was to capture the loneliness of space travel and the sensation of voyaging through a black hole. For the purposes of listening to this disk, you don’t really need to know that or get it. Instead, just settle back and sink slowly into Gibson’s grim-edged dronework and see where it takes you. The five tracks here are long explorations into dark spaces, and make for a very interesting journey.
“Beauty in Desolation Part 1” opens the disc, taking almost a full two minutes to fully build and assert itself in the listener’s ears. Once it arrives, it becomes a rolling sine-wave flow with sawtooth textures of varying intensity.
“Redshift” takes a space-wind drone and spatters it with dots of static like an undecipherable message from a distant star. Throughout the track, bright pads rise briefly against the dark–my vote is still out on how well these somewhat intrusive moments fit with the rest of the piece.
“Requiem for Dead Spacemen” is, suitably, the CD’s centerpiece, a somberly graceful work loaded with narrative content. Vocal samples, including President Reagan’s speech after the Challenger disaster, snake through the slow, sad drifts to lend even more weight. At midpoint the sound of a rocket engine comes in, and given the feeling of what’s come before and what follows, it can only be heard as the sound of an unfortunate re-entry, the crackle of unstoppable fire. It’s a gorgeous piece of work.
“Beauty in Desolation Part 2,” Gibson’s sonic version of passing through a black hole, opens on a wobbling tremolo chord like warming starship engines, then hits the event horizon with a long, loud spiral of noise before returning to the tremolo (which emerges throughout the piece to anchor the narrative), and then on into vaster zones.
The disk ends with the cold, minimalist wash and warble of “Monolith”–and is that a 2001: A Space Odyssey sound clip I hear? Why yes, it is. This track begins to fades to a calm and quiet end, and then hits us with the familar tremolo from earlier—one final jump, this time to a nearly empty point in space, and Gibson’s narrative completes itself.
Gibson notes, on his web site and myspace page, that his second CD is in the works. I’m looking forward to it and to the chance to further immerse myself in the sounds of Broken Harbour.
Broken Harbour, the recording pseudonym of Canada’s Blake Gibson, explores the stillness of seclusion with his debut self-titled record. An exercise in silence and distance as much as it is in drone and noise, Broken Harbour is a creation that forms and dissipates like a cluster of gas in the outer reaches of the universe.
Like casting off into a vast sea of nothingness, the five tracks flee convention and structure in favour of the greener pastures of artistic expression and ultimate defiance.
It’s easy to flippantly describe ambient and drone music as sound that simply floats, but something about Gibson’s Broken Harbour seems darker and denser. There is progress to the sound, soft comfort in the noise, and the record’s measured, arcane intention never loses its footing. Spellbinding and yet utterly remote, Broken Harbour is compelling.
Gibson’s affinity for the world “out there” is abundantly clear. Using synthetic sources, real time performances and sound samples, Broken Harbour is the intricate apex of many nights of stargazing and countless days of endless pondering.
The record took nearly a year to put together and, with a highly-delayed release, stands as a testimony to the determination of one artist to simply get things right. There is principle, intention and care in every carefully-built instant of sound.
Some albums feature standout tracks that deserve closer glances, while others function much better as a whole. Broken Harbour is the latter, a flowing and artful recording with designs of full, rich listening. The recommendation for ideal listening conditions featured on the promo’s sleeve is no accident, as the capacity and intensity of sound almost requires a stereo equipped with a subwoofer or, at the very least, a decent pair of headphones.
The quintet of tracks featured here contains sound of evolving splendour, evocative authenticity and heavenly vitality. As Gibson places each portion where it should be, a sense of weightlessness infuses the music and sends it soaring.
Broken Harbour deserves full, upright attention. The world of Canadian drone may not be as well-known as it should be, but if Blake Gibson has anything to say about it, we’ll be hearing dynamic, transcendent noise from the Great White North for years to come.
It took out ten months for Canadian musician Blake Gibson to gather the material for this debut album under the name of Broken Harbour. Honestly, I do not know much about him but the result is really impressive: a beautiful, deep, and very dark atmospheric ambient music, based on synthesizers, samplers and real time performances. Each of the five pieces of this CD is an hallucinatory narrative travel through time and space, with passages that are sometimes more ethereal and at other times quite gloomy. The work on sound is particularly meticulous and delicate. It is written on the backcover: "All glitches and extreme low frequencies are intentional and part of the composition, ideal listening is achieved by using either headphones or a subwoofer equipped stereo".
If drone music can sometimes be quite boring, the organic and melancholy darkness of this CD is really addictive. If the first song "Beauty in Desolation pt.1" is a fascinating floating song for the beginning of a travel into cosmic dimensions, the second song "Redshift" reveals to be quite darker, with its symphonic samples, moving low sounds and crackings which seem to come out from an old used vinyl record. The third song goes even further to describe a sense of desolation and isolation, almost painful and that can almost bring tears in eyes: "Requiem for Dead Spacemen".
This is surely the most successful piece of this record. Quite strangely, we can hear the voice of Ronald Reagan emerging unexpectedly from this sadness. The fourth song is a following of the first one, "Beauty in Desolation pt2" based on circular vibrating sounds which transform the vastness of space into a claustrophobic area. The word "beauty" should be changed here by the term "sublime", as philosopher Edmund Burke defined it in the eighteenth century: a feeling of delightful claustrophobic terror in front of the vastness and immensity of nature and cosmic elements, so well represented by the paintings of John Martin. For Gibson, this song is like "the musical equivalent of being sucked into a black hole". "Monolith" concludes the CD with a tension that goes from uneasiness to haunting silence. A blurry, nebulous piece, so cold that it can make you shiver.
Broken Harbour is a good example of the best things that can emerge from the minimalist ambient drone scene.
The first release by self-described Canadian ambient and drone musician Blake Gibson, “Broken Harbour” has the air about it of a meticulously considered first effort. It was recorded over a relatively long period of time – close to a year – and it sounds it too. Every aspect of the mood and tone sound carefully thought out. Each specific sound used is done so with intent. One can virtually hear the weight of the pressure to make, if not a genuine grand-artistic-statement, then at least “a record that I would want to listen to over and over again”, as Gibson muses in the press-release.
The CD captures the sound of isolation, desolation – inspired, apparently, by the Canadian wilderness. The disc thus consists of five long form variants of this theme. “Beauty in Desolation pt.1” is slowly unfolding drone with a metallic sheen to it, while “Redshift” stakes out a more ambient territory, consisting mainly of background crackling and the periodic surfacing of an ominous keyboard melody. The sound is a not exactly unfamiliar mixture of found sound and instrumentation, digitally processed, layered and stretched-out to create a sense of ethereal inhospitability – think maybe, the halfway point between Skullflower and Eluvium.
With a playing time of considerably over an hour, this is a very long release, and is, given what can only be described as its excessive polish, frankly, somewhat ponderous. It is a drone album entirely confident with its status as drone music, and as a result, entirely accomplished. Yet, it's ultimately dis-satisfactory nature is exactly this – it never wants to be anything but drone music for gazing at the stars. 6/10
Broken Harbour is the alias of Blake Gibson, a Canadian musician who focuses on deep and minimal ambient drone-based music, for which he applies synthetic sources, assorted samples, and real time performances.
The biggest part of the album, containing five long form pieces, explores the isolation that a space explorer experiences, conveying a sense of foreboding distance while floating in the vast emptiness of space.
Blake explains he’s fond of remote, barren landscapes and spacious places, therefore creating desolate, intriguing soundscape textures (some of extreme low frequencies), crackles and glitches which slowly evolve from ethereal and suffocating to crystalline and beautiful. This description made me think the music of this self-titled debut might be sounding like Ran Kirlian, Max Corbacho and even Steve Roach.
It turned out somewhat otherwise, as the meandering, pretty dark and gloomy drone-textures are actually more in vein of "Deep Frieze" by Sleep Research Facility or the debut release of "3 Seconds of Air".
The track "Requiem for Dead Spacemen", found at the centre of the album, deserves a special mention. It sounds more fluid, and is an emotional, melancholic tribute to those who lost their lives out there.
All who love long form spacious realms and expansive drone tapestries should check out this well-produced release.