Be Still For Certainty

Michael Baum returns to ECHØVEIL with Be Still For Certainty, another absolutely gorgeous descent into the slow, suspended nowhere of minimal ambient drone. A music dwelling at the thin border between worlds. Long tones breathe, hover, erode. Vast layers of sound remain almost impossibly still while, somewhere inside them, strange little keyboard apparitions begin to flicker — schizoïd constellations, crooked interstellar lights, fragments of some obsolete celestial machinery briefly awakening in the fog. There is something deeply peaceful here, but never entirely reassuring. The music floats in that peculiar region where serenity becomes alien, where repetition slowly alters the architecture of perception and where a single sustained frequency can suddenly feel larger than the room, larger than the night, perhaps larger than whatever world we accidentally woke up inside. Ghosts of Eliane Radigue, Steve Roach, Roland Kayn, Abul Mogard and Kyle Bobby Dunn may occasionally drift through these immense spaces, but Baum follows his own quiet trajectory toward something increasingly distant, abstract and beautifully unplaceable. -Sir Kuliktavikt