Austin Williamson + Blanket Swimming — Horizons

Horizons is a collaboration between two artists with whom I have no prior familiarity, Austin Williamson and Blanket Swimming, both from Kansas City, Missouri, with numerous releases on Bandcamp and many small experimental labels.  This album consists of two longer pieces, 15-20 minutes each, alternated with a couple of shorter tracks, though the actual listening experience feels quite continuous.

I am initially greeted by birds chirping and a celestial tone contrail, a chord shimmering in the sun.  This is the 4-minute intro, entitled "39°02'38.7"N 95°12’21.5"W", recalling for me the fast motion aerial zooms of vast landscapes in IMAX nature documentaries.  So far, this recording falls under classic space ambient, with a high-quality, ear-massaging production.  The 20-minute piece to follow "Viewing Ourselves as Strangers" begins much along the same lines, with currents of air and chordal drone, in a gentle, constant motion like a flowing stream.

The album turns out to be a lovely piece of ambient, like an enveloping womb providing a proper space to think.  Deeply soothing, a mental refuge, yet it contains no cheesy new age tropes.  Though it is a collaborative album, the style is contiguous; there is no hint of who might've done what.  The sound simply undulates aquatically, with a brilliant luminosity, processed in such a way that the boundary between field recordings, artificially created noise/verb and synthesiser tone blurs and becomes indistinct.  Rather than imagining musicians in a studio, I am transported to distant windy fields and mountains.  The feeling of being in nature has been captured magnificently, and the sense of space is absolutely massive.  Due to its organic sound, I would compare it to Alio Die or the early works of Aglaia, or perhaps Steve Roach's "Immersion" series.  This may be one of my favorite works of ambient, with a perfectly desirable balance of tone, emotion and depth. For more