Transfer

There is a rare kind of music that asks nothing of the listener except presence. Australian sound artist Michael Baum has quietly mastered that language. With Transfer, his latest EP for ECHØVEIL RECORDS, Baum once again distills the ambient drone form to its purest essence. Every sustained tone, every delicate harmonic bloom, every almost-imperceptible shift seems to exist outside the urgency of ordinary time, inviting us instead into a state of quiet suspension. This is music of thresholds. A shoreline at dawn where water and sky have yet to decide which belongs to the other. A solitary stand of trees dissolving into pale mist. The gentle sensation that something has changed within the landscape, though nothing appears to have moved. Baum possesses that rare ability to create immense emotional depth through the smallest of gestures. His drones never overwhelm; they patiently unfold, revealing hidden textures that seem less composed than discovered, as though they had always been quietly resonating beneath the surface of the world. -Sir Kuliktavikt