Accomplice Affair - "Samotny Horyzont"
 

9,5 Euro  with shipping sold out

 procdr/ box

Accomplice Affair is a Polish dark ambient outfit and Samotny Horyzont is their third release. The artwork deserves immediate mention for this CD, a very dark and foreboding canvas painting of mist-soaked trees that conjured for me, if anything, an animistic black metal feel. Unfortunately, the music failed to match the evocative artwork.

Unusually for dark ambient, this music is strongly guitar driven, the guitars in question being soaked heavily in delay, reverb, and the like, to create drifting and washed out musical figures. At times the music dissolves completely into drones, at other times there are quite distinct recurring melodic elements.

To be honest I am not sure that “dark” is really an appropriate description for this album, which is actually quite light and paints little in the way of brooding menace or threatening shadow. The timbres are often quite bright and metallic, and while some of the guitar figures I could imagine would work well if transposed to a black metal context, it would definitely be the more melodic end of BM.

Why do I say that the music falls short of the artwork? Well, sadly I feel it falls down in the atmosphere department. The main stumbling block is the production, and particularly the guitar production. The sound is quite thin and, dare I say it, underdone.

As such it doesn’t conjure the “very intense, emotional, and psychedelic moments” promised in the press release: if anything it conjures an image of the artist, guitar on lap, foot on digital effects pedal, recording straight to computer, perhaps in their bedroom.

I know, that’s a very rough thing to say, and as is often the case I am hesitant to offer criticism where the problem might simply be that the artist is working with limited resources. Nonetheless, having reviewed a lot of really engulfing, brilliantly produced ambient music in the last few months, this release just sounds thin or weak in comparison.

I find that ambient music works best when, even if you can identify the instruments being used, you nevertheless don’t really think about them and instead experience the music as a pure force and entity unto itself, a direct opening of atmosphere or mood. This release, however, is hampered by the aforementioned production issues, and fails to achieve this level of immersive power.

Under better recording conditions I might have found the music more fascinating and engaging. This is particularly a shame because the guitar could be exploited to really weave subtle atmospheres together, but that will never work if the music as a whole sounds anaemic to the ear. One for my “I wish I liked it more than I do” pile. (heathenharvest.com)

http://accompliceaffair.herobo.com/