The 2017 installment of Kompakt's ever-reliable
Pop Ambient series serves up a typical assortment of wintry, occasionally somber, always reflective ambient pieces. The first few selections are the most experimental, with shifting and stirring sounds buried underneath the glacial synthesizer pads and twinkling pianos.
Kenneth James Gibson's "Her Flood Knocked Me to the Ground (But I Was Already There)" features grainy static and dub echo that has been filtered down to crumbs, but atop the crackle sits a soft pulse and hazy slide guitar. Kompakt co-founder
Wolfgang Voigt provides a remix of
Soulsavers' "Hal," which sprinkles delicate pianos over dramatic strings, underpinned by a sporadic slapping noise.
Scanner and
Yui Onodera's "Locus Solus" has more of a pulsating bassline along with its frayed textures and clear pianos, as well as scattered voices from
Scanner's namesake device. Along with
Gibson, all of the other artists who have released full albums as part of Kompakt's Pop Ambient sublabel provide highlights on this collection.
Jens-Uwe Beyer's "Final 9.1" buries soft beats under pillows of comforting keyboards, and
Thore Pfeiffer's "Good Life" is a strange floating loop with chimes and fragmented voices poking out. Another
Beyer piece closes the release, dispensing with the loops and detached rhythms common to most tracks on the album, instead floating in distant, uninterrupted space. ~ Paul Simpson