Source: Gothic Beauty Magazine
Album: “I Swear By All The Flowers”
Date: 04/2008
Review:
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, eerie 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.
Source: The Headphone Commute
Album: “I Swear By All The Flowers”
Date: 04/10/2008
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.
Source: Grave Concerns
Reviewer: Matthew J.
Album: “I Swear By All The Flowers”
Date: 11/04/2007
Review:
Life Toward Twilight’s Daniel Tuttle returns with his first complete concept album in years. Tied together more by mood than concrete story, this album begins with the sound of a music box on “Sleepy/Solitude,” and though dark ambient composers have been using music boxes to create horrific atmosphere at least since the days of Coil’s unreleased “Hellraiser” soundtrack, Tuttle actually does something different with it. This isn’t horror movie stuff; it’s actually quite pretty, creating a pleasant nostalgia through softly plinking melodies against a background of static. This sort of dusty yet comforting sensation continues on “Threnody to the Quiet Mind,” with its sparse, somehow antique-sounding piano, and “The Theft of Memory,” with wooden rattling and creaks–again, a frequent trope of dark ambient used here for something other than chills and creepiness–conjuring up a sense of lost treasures languishing in an old attic somewhere. Even the noisy, more industrialized elements on this recording are less oppressive than rustic and old-fashioned, more suited to some small town in the early 20th century than a crumbling futuristic apocalypse. “Threnody to Our Time Apart” uses what sounds like a rumbling steam train for a sense of melancholy, and the background effect of “An Incoherent Lullaby” sounds like static only at first, gradually resolving itself into the smoldering embers of a warm fireplace as rain beats down on the roof above. On previous releases, Tuttle demonstrated a mastery of dark soundscapes that equalled that of NON and Desiderii Marginis, but with this album he uses similar techniques to create an altogether different mood, a bittersweet tranquillity that should especially please fans of the emotive “ghost ambient” of painter and composer Tor Lundvall.
