Review on “The Silent Ballet”

http://www.thesilentballet.com/ posted a review for “An Eclipse“:

Have you ever walked home through a city at four in the morning? Walking a couple miles along roads and concrete normally fraught with activity can be a surprisingly quiet experience. You encounter bright street lamps, electric signs with circuit quirks, the occasional trash-rummaging animal and a few cars driven by what seem like zombies, but mostly it’s just you and yourself.An Eclipse sounds like one of these late night walks, and Life Toward Twilight, as a name, is ever so appropriate for Daniel Tuttle’s music.

An Eclipse, a 3″ CD on the Bottle Imp label, is the fourth official release from Life Toward Twilight. Tuttle made 25 copies of this work in 2003 to give away, but this is the first time it’s ever been available to a wider audience. The album is divided into two movements, and lasts just the right amount of time for you to say “no” to a taxi and take a jaunt through the concrete jungle. It begins with a slow-pulsing drone of grey clouds, evoking that feeling of pause one gets when stopped near a solitary street lamp, while exploring a sleeping city. Nocturnal whirs and swaths of bowed metal join a distant melange of singing bowls as the dominant ‘Om’ drone weaves subterranean tones at a lugubrious pace. The ominous nature of some of these sounds are kept at arm’s length and don’t sound either bright or overly dark. It’s dark, but not freak-out-dark, like if you can imagine how an abandoned building won’t hurt you but can keep your exploration modest.

The second movement is a collaboration between Tuttle, synth/noise player Brent Nicholas, and female vocalist Elyse Reardon. Here, sonic weather enters the fray, as mechanical tones and damaged winds force their way through your headphones, often blowing them out entirely. Slowly we hear Reardon’s haunting, headless vocals drift out of the storm clouds, casting a shadowy mood that invokes decaying beauty. If I were engaged in a terrifying interactive video game environment, fearfully turning corners where aliens could be waiting to pounce, this music would really fit. On its own, An Eclipse is honestly not all that gripping, as I feel its attempt at spookiness is too ambitious for the sounds themselves. Its timbre and minimalist quality is very similar to some of Richie Hawtin’s beat-less Plastikman work, which always puts me on pause and makes me feel like a meat puppet on drugs.

The album closes with a bit of a twisted “epilogue”. A cello or other stringed instrument is bent and colored sepia on a crackly turntable, sounding much like the bygone-era sound collages of Eric Cordier, while a hushed male voice recites a brief poem. It’s a nice, aural pastiche, as if we are privy to a final scene when the speaker was alone in his apartment hours after a cosmic event, writing these sparse words to a loved one, or himself, or no one.

An Eclipse’s dark, ambient bath of sound is a decent, pocket-sized piece of Life Toward Twilight’s work, but it isn’t long enough to really engage in Daniel Tuttle’s world. The tracks are missing a bit of the depth that gives similar artists (i.e. Aidan Baker, Maeror Tri etc.) an edge and a listener’s longevity, but for someone wanting a gateway drug to the world of dark ambient music, you might take a crack at a disc like this.

Interview with Sepiachord

Today Sepiachord posted an interview with Life Toward Twilight in relation to the “Edison’s Frankenstein” album. Read it here.

New Review on JudasKiss

A new review for “We Waited For A Subtle Dawn” posted on JudasKiss:

We Waited For A Subtle Dawn contains 15 tracks totalling 67 minutes. ‘A Subtle Dawn’ opens with a passage of a cappella wordless female vocals, which give way to a gloriously uplifting orchestral overture mingled with a confusion of looped crowd noise and staccato violins, which recall the work of modernist composer Steve Reich. Cymbal crashes and snare drum rolls add a bombastic martial flavour, but the track is over all too quickly, giving way to the choppy strings and strange scrabbling noises of ‘In A Chalice Shape’. Again, pizzicato strings and heavy rolls of percussion lend this track a cinematic, neo-classical quality. Life Toward Twilight are operating in the same general area as Shinjuku Thief, Frederik Klingwall or A Challenge Of Honour, at the point where neo-classical, orchestral compositions take on narrative overtones, evoking visions through sound. ‘”Time”, She Says’ is very different, though, eschewing orchestral instrumentation in favour of thunder effects rumbling across the stereo channels and a dense, gloopy morass of dripping and whispering, with a steady ticking clock fading in to mark the passage of time, a theme which continues into the following two tracks, ‘”Time”, She Points Again’ and ‘Years’, all of which reminded me a little of the recent Eight Studies In Transition collaboration between K. Mietzer and Horologium. All these tracks use cold, bleak dark ambient soundscapes, only occasionally introducing conventional instruments – a brief passage of cello, a lonely, remote piano melody, a dissonant blast of horns. The next few tracks are rather samey and indistinguishable – low, industrial ambient drones and subdued strings punctuated by deep, reverberating percussion and vocal samples, but the tenth track, ‘Eclipse II’ stands out, opening with thin, scraping high frequency tones, and bringing in dense barrages of textural noise and whistling feedback, something like Toroidh or Droin. Elyse Reardon’s vocals float above this uncompromisingly bleak backdrop. ‘Horbehutet’ is the lengthiest track on the album, at nearly nine minutes, and it’s a mesmeric, immersive experience of deep, Ain Soph-like esoteric drones and muffled, distant beats – I’d have been delighted by a whole album sounding like this, but Life Toward Twilight is a very eclectic and diverse-sounding project, ranging far and wide across various musical styles whilst preserving the prevailing dark mood.

“We Waited For A Subtle Dawn” is still available on CD, and can be downloaded for free from the Bottle Imp Productions site.

Sorry again to JudasKiss for disc mixup, normally promo packages go out with a lot of material. Will send you a better package soon!

Review/Interview from The Headphone Commute

The Headphone Commute posted a new review of “I Swear By All The Flowers“. They also posted a quick interview.

The review:

Tiny vinyl crackles are quietly put to sleep by a music box lullaby. The simplistic nature of I Swear By All The Flowers urges against dismissing the album too quickly. And so I dig. Bottle Imp is an independent label specializing in genres like glitch, breakcore, ethereal and darkwave. Its four first official releases are from a single artist, plus a recent addition to its roster, BLÆRG. That first, prominent name, is Life Toward Twilight, a Detroit based solo dark ambient and post-industrial project of Daniel Tuttle. Tuttle is the man behind the label as well, which features an archive of previous net releases available as a free download. But the record that I’m listening to is far from any of the above mentioned genres. It’s ambient atmospheres, dirty hisses, and analog noises as if they were recorded from… ah, yes! All of the sounds indeed were recorded from antique sources, like grandfather clocks, music boxes, old factories, steam trains, and yes, even wax cylinder recordings! I am a proud owner of a Victrola myself, which I occasionally wind up to marvel at its analog technology of sound magnification. An entire album made of such bits and pieces, with an old detuned piano, is a truly haunting experience. A meditative echo of the past. Voices of a forgotten era recorded by the magnetic fields of earth. This is an experimental album you’ll play over and over, and then talk to your friends about. Reminded me of The Refractors, Elegi, and Deaf Center.

The interview:

First of all, what gave you the idea of creating such an album?

Honestly, it was the next natural step for me in my music evolution. I consider myself an ambient artist, and my usual goal is to create a certain vibe and mood. I do not fully subscribe to Eno’s idea that ambient music should not be distracting in anyway. I like to tell stories, and I do that by adding stuff to the foreground of the music, though in very subtle ways. Most of my work in the past is narration to a story I have in my head. I still feel my music works as ambient music, though. I had been dwelling on this idea of making music that is intentionally low fidelity that creates an antique and rusty atmosphere. I love deep drones, but I wanted to move away from that and try something very different. My story is old, and I wanted the music to sound appropriately aged. The rule I set for myself in this recording is that I could only use sound sources that either were from the late Victorian era, or could have existed at the time. Then I mixed them using the same sort of production techniques I used for my older albums. Even the melodies are intentionally detuned and decrepit.

Tell us about the main character of the story within the music.
My protagonist is the ghost of an old man that died in autumn of the year 1908. The music largely represents this man’s memories, starting from his youth and moving all the way to his deathbed. The music is a reflection on his life, loves lost, long travels and sad nostalgia. I imagined it narrated like a fuzzy dream sequence, with no good order or rhythm. When building the album, each track represented an individual experience or memory, with some repeating themes. I usually do not tell the actual story, preferring the music to do that job for me.

Do you really own an wax cylinder phonograph? I’m a geek when it comes to antique technology.
I own a single wax cylinder, but no phonograph. I would love to own one though! I am fascinated by antique sound equipment, as well. When I was putting together the idea for this album, I contemplated a hundred different ways to go about the production. What I really wanted to do was record the whole thing on a wax cylinder phonograph, and then re-record it digitally for production. However, the technical and financial hurdles would have slowed down the production on the album significantly, possibly for years. I decided to recreate it the best way I could with the tools I have, which is ultimately how I get everything done. All of the static is from some very nice wax cylinder recordings. A lot of the background vocal snippets are from home recordings done on wax cylinders.

New review for “Blood”

New review for “Blood” from Industrial.org:

I received “We waited for a subtle dawn” from Life Toward Twilight a few years back, and I liked it a lot. It was diverse dark ambient, and overall pretty solid. So I wasn’t really surprised when I popped in “Blood” and found that it was another slab of quality reverb soaked nefariousness.

Overall this album sounds like a 16th century english village being slaughtered by a storm of very fucked up demons, which in my book is really, really cool. If you dig dark ambient you have no reason not to get yourself some “Blood”.

Emphasis added by me, because you know, that’s a pretty great description in my opinion.

Remember, “Blood” can be downloaded for free at Bottle Imp Productions. Higher quality can be had via iTunes or Amazon MP3

Gothic Beauty Review

A review of “I Swear By All The Flowers” is in the current issue of Gothic Beauty Magazine. Read below:

This subtle, solitary album can really grab you. It opens with lulling, fragile musicbox notes and continues at the level of a faded recording, layered with background noise and ghostly voices that make it the aural equivalent of seeing orbs on old photographs. A charming but hesitant vintage piano performs in the foreground, but is gradually crowded with the noise of objects clanking and jingling together, as though spirits are trying to make themselves heard. In a really eye-widening moment, a very faint, eerir song is tuned in through the static, until it is subsumed by another oceanic storm of white noise. Put on your headphones to listen, or you might not pick up its signal and realize how strangely moving it is.

As a reminder, this album is now available as a free download from the Bottle Imp Productions site.