Review Summary: Ambient for the Sargasso Sea
Hyunhye Seo, well-known as Angela of Xiu Xiu, has been releasing ambient under her own name for all of two years now. And if it's almost
de rigueur for any given member of a vaguely artsy musical act to release a solo ambient album or two, Seo seems to have a knack for it that speaks to the more timbral, atmospheric qualities of her main project better than many other artists doing the same. Eel, a relatively brief, 33 minute foray into a mariana trench of atmosphere, also displays a startling and effective talent for structure and spontaneity, only hampered slightly by a retreat into drab and dusky background sounds on the back half of the album.
Eel I is a drift along waves of sound, a grey wall building and receding, a constant movement back and forth into gloom and night. The impression I got was of ocean waves crashing against a cliff at dusk, punctuated by periodic dips below the dark, cold water. The piano, pounding atonally or sounding out ecstatic, stormy chord patterns layers itself over the icy pulse and swell as it envelops and swells around the listener, builds and recedes in its own time, distinct and aware of the movement of the textures around it. Like the post-ambient of Tim Hecker, the music on Eel I is too structurally complex and aurally dense to be allowed to fade into the background. Seo is preoccupied with seizing the attention of the listener through washes of eerie atmosphere touched with grinding post-industrial, the ever-shifting motion of Eel I imitating the cold, oceanic roil of the masses of that track's namesake.
Eel II is a more distant, serene track, an immediately noticeable, if mild, step down that would almost feel like it was just padding out the album run-time if it weren't for the care and subtlety with which Hyunhye makes her drones recede and pulse around the dim evening light, rattled here and there by the train-passage of brushed metal percussion and looming swells of sound. It's a patient, meditative counterpoint to the first half which, if not as dynamic and immediate, still, for the most part, lives up to the sense of craftsmanship Seo displays on the first track.
Like the music of Xiu Xiu, Eel finds its home in shadows, in the mystery and terror of fecundity. But otherwise her music shows an almost total distance from Xiu Xiu's project, from the revealed underbelly of pop music or the social dynamic, from the turbid animality of desire and fetishism as applied to campy histrionics. Its distance from anything but the most elemental concerns with human experience, and its engagement with the broadest themes of Xiu Xiu on the terms of the mysterious breeding habits of the animal that gives the album its name make its thematic intent ultimately that of nature and the unknown. If its second half lived up to the first, it would be one of the great success stories in ambient music this year. As it is, Eel is a more than respectable sophomore effort from a creative mind that has managed to step out of the shadow of her other project.
