Customer Reviews

Consciousness

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

clocking in at under 40 minutes, this album is not composed of songs, but landscapes - pieces of structured noise from heavily treated guitars. at first you might think that it is just minute after minute of repetition, and you might be right, unless you listen further, deeper past the most clearly audible noise. carl hultgren relies on heavy reverb, delay and phaser effects on his guitar to produce the otherwordly chime on the opener, and layers sheets of distortion to create the wave effect on balance. the second half of the album finds windy weber whispering hushed and almost indecipherable vocals over a series of blurred tones. windy and carl have used the guitar and bass almost as ambient instruments, like a synthesiser - the heavily processed sounds are reminiscent of an earthier eno or fripp. labradford and stars of the lid are other collectives that employ the beauty of shimmering ambience in their work. i am a big fan of the constellation groups and sonic youth's experimental releases. this album mimics the warmth of godspeed's arpeggio's without the field tapes, drums and strings, and sonic youth's whirlwinds of sound without the abrasives and fractures. it is a beautiful journey, like a dream - like seeing the light at the end of that tunnel, if you believe in all that stuff.

Post-rock is a genre ridden with depressing, cold sound scapes (Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Sigur Ros) that although beautiful, are not for everyone. After purchasing "Lift Your Skinny Fists..." by GYBE!, I was looking up some new post-rock bands when I stumbled upon Windy and Carl.

The website I was on had some free downloads by many indie/obscure artists including the song "conciousness" off this album. The idea of the song seems almost boring: the same chord for 12 and a half minutes with only slight variations to the drone and some weird helicopter noise. I kept the song on my computer but didnt listen to it again until one day it came up on shuffle. I gave it a chance and found that it was one of the most simple yet most beautiful songs I had ever heard. I bought the album and realized that the song i knew was only the tip of the iceberg. The album as a whole completely blew my mind. It is the kind of beauty that you find when you look really closely at a simple everyday thing that you normally blow off or take for granted. One could say this music was boring and that it doesnt do anything interesting, but that would be just looking at the surface. You have to give it a chance, listen to what it truely is and emmerse yourself in the music, and then you find its amazing, simple beauty.

The difference between this and most other post-rock is that it makes you feel at ease and content with the world around you. I highly reccomend it to post-rock fans and anyone looking for a relaxing listen who's willing to try something new. Perfect for meditation, sleeping, and watching clouds.

Windy and Carl are a duo that have been doing their take on drone music since 1993 or so. Consciousness is by far their most unique and exceptional release. It starts out with "the sun," simple double noted guitar riffs repeated on the upper octaves of the guitar, done as if a kind of mantra. The sound of this track is shimmery and inviting. Shortly afterward the listener is plunged into the subliminal depths of the next two tracks. They are darker and intense sounding, highly atmospheric, in stark contrast to the opening track. "the llama's dream" serves as a gateway to the title track "consciousness," a masterpiece of layered bliss (with the hushed vocals of Windy serving as a bed of comfort). Finally we are brought back down home with the ending track, "resolution."
All in all this is one of my favorite albums in the genres of ambient and drone, and I have heard quite a few. All of the different sounds are put together on this album in a way that makes it very cohesive, in a way that is hard to explain. What I also love is that the duo find ways to use the guitar as a textural instrument in a unique fashion, using layering, little distortion, and multiple effects. The result makes this album a great night time listen. Recommended highly if you love introspective music.

No one I knew who listened seriously to "Depths", the predecessor to "Consciousness", failed to recognize that its most universal and unifying feature was the heavily-fuzzed distortion and feedback brought to bear on the majority of the tracks, giving them a murky, almost-submerged sound through which the universe seemed to roar in a continual wave; of all of Windy and Carl's releases, this was easily the densest; almost claustrophobic, in fact.

Released in 2001, "Consciousness" was a welcome return to form, promoting a meditative, dream-like, heavily-atmospheric vibration that enables the listener to disengage from their familiar moorings and become receptive to new levels of perception and insight. Mixing together an agglomeration of effects through his pedals rack allows guitarist Carl Hultgren to produce heavily processed phrasing that sounds as if he's levitating numberless, particulating fragments of resonating crystal within the confines of a small cyclonic funnel, creating an intricately textured,shimmering arrangement of notes against a background of massive, tonally elongated drones that seem as unlimited and variable as the number of dimensions in the universe, intersecting with the round, immersive tones of Windy Weber's keyboards to spatially expand the arrangement of every cut excepting "Balance".

And from "The Sun" to "Elevation" to "The Llama's Dream" to the title track itself, the path Carl follows promotes a sense of warmth and intimacy, with bouyant passages of delayed or reverbed strumming followed by heavily modulated, infinitely-expansive droning, and wonderfully rendered interludes of chiming, multiplicative fretwork, all marking positive transitions through escalating levels of warm, contemplative ambient bliss. Something radiant emanates from "Consciousness", and you'd do well to drop it down, turn it up, and tune it in.