A Crown of Amaranth - Manuscript/Winterup
Audio Savant – 2005
By Russell Garwood
I feel kind of discombobulated. Discombobulated is a cool word. It has bob in the middle. This is the effect
A Crown of Amaranth has on me. It reflects the fact that this CD is seemingly an agglomeration of random thoughts and feelings.
I wonder what happens if you eat inuprofen gel?
My apologies, having taken a few minutes to compose myself, I can now talk in a sensible manner. (It doesn’t taste so good, and my mouth has gone all numb…). Yes, the music on
Manuscript/Winterup is – in fact – not quite as random as I have lead you to believe. While the different samples, sounds, and melodies are seemingly incongruous, they mesh together well into a rather unusual take on minimal, noisy dark ambient. Kind of. (Note: Ibuprofen gel and then beer = not good mixture.) Ambient sounds are low key and effective, while electronics vary between noise and less jarring tones. The songs are loosely structured - usually linear - moving through a series of different moods and feels in each. At times the harsh moments are up there with the more acerbic moments of
Whitehouse, and occasional organic sounds such as muffled guitars prove welcome.
This is all presented in (what I’m assuming is) a very limited CDr run from Audiosavant. Clear production, artwork almost as amorphous as the songs, and the very nature of the music itself gives this cult appeal, backed up by solid experimentation in terms of content. This is for fans of the more esoteric side of electronics, and one thing is for sure – Audiosavant weren’t shitting us when they call themselves awkward and uncomfortable music.
7/10
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