Ant’lrd & Benoît Pioulard - Deck Amber

I can't help but shake this idea of Thomas Meluch (aka Benoît Pioulard), as being the kind of musician to have his fingers on the pulse of the relatively small corner of the ambient music world at all times — not only releasing some of the most beautiful and thoughtful music in the genre at an amazingly consistent rate over the past ten plus years, but also displaying a seemingly infinite amount of passion as listener, collaborator, and friend. All it takes is a quick glance at some of his most recent collaborations, with names such as Kyle Bobby Dunn and Rafael Anton Irissari, to get the impression that Thomas is likely the kind of individual to spend an equal amount of time discovering and obsessing over music as he does creating it, building a network of like-minded artists along the way, resulting in some of the most fruitful creative relationships imaginable.

On his most recent collaberation, Portlands Sounds et al sees Pioulard joining forces with Colin Blanton of Ant'lrd, on an album that puts that sense of mutual appreciation on full display; the sound of two artists with a clear understanding and respect for each others work, gently following each others leads in a slow dance of swirling, degraded tones and unspooling static hiss.

Slowly revealing itself amidst a dusty beam of light, Deck Amber opens with the nostalgic tape shimmer of Corvid, sounding like the distillation of some half-remembered moment in time of utter safety and surrender often associated with childhood, like the warm glow of a childhood home beckoning you home at the end of a long summer day. As each billowing note begins to lose it's definition and clarity, blurring together like the details of memory, the melody is slowly overtaken by the slow release of tape hiss, like a gradually fading memory given over to less tangible anchors — the vague recollection of a taste, or a smell.

Throughout Deck Amber is the sense of some sort of profound and yet deeply unconscious conversation taking place, two minds linked somewhere in the ether of creativity and a shared vulnerability. The varying textures of Vacant's untethered drones interact like waves in the ocean, meeting in seemingly random trajectories and creating unexpected patterns and shapes out of each other with each rolling tide, while Docene releases thick washes of stardust into the oceans current, soft synth pads creating channels of untapped cosmic energy, shimmering just below the waters surface.

Drifting amidst swells of towering, vibrating energy, Thomas and Colin search for warmth in an unknowable vastness of uncertainty, and yet know exactly when to draw things back to a smaller scale with moments of subtle, human charm. The abrupt start to Elan's disintegrating chords, like the keys of an old organ finally unstuck without warning or pretext, throw the listener unprepared into the saturated melancholy of old home videos, the ghostly images of lovers and friends skipping and fading with the degradation of time.

Closing the album are two side-long solo pieces of unspeakable beauty — not to mention significant length, each piece reaching around the ten minute mark— an unconventional and yet hugely rewarding decision in sequencing that serves to highlight the fact that this is an album borne primarily on mutual understanding, respect, and, most importantly, a desire to see other grow and succeed: an important and valuable life lesson that we could all certainly learn from.

http://www.soundsetal.com/project/antlrd-benoit-pioulard-deck-amber/