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Reviews

Brannan Lane — Piano Dreams & Nightscapes
(Ambient Circle ACM102, 2004, CD)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2004-06-01

Piano Dreams & Nightscapes Cover art

The two part “Piano Dreams” accounts for almost the first 25 minutes of this latest by Brannan Lane; for those familiar with his other floating ambient works, this is in many ways similar, with dreamy cinematic soundscapes serving as a backdrop for some evaporous and heavily treated slow melodic abstractions on piano – sounds all seeming to blend together in a spacious dreamworld that draws the listener deep into its origins. Here we find an area where the space between the notes yields more influence on the overall effect than the notes themselves, which become merely guideposts in a thick, dense fog that exists forever in every direction. “Fallen Nightscapes” follows, leaving the piano behind and moving more into the area of pure ambient drift, where slow moving sonic images flow in and out of the field of vision, like fleeting voices and echoes of sounds that seemingly have no source. This is deep sleep music, guiding the listener through layers of subconscious travel. The piano returns with “Moonlit Reflections”, a stream of consciousness flurry of melodicism, sharing the space with gentle floating percussives and synth-voices. The expansive “Daze Gone By” closes the disc, which offers an array of random ethereal melodic ‘events’ of varying textural color and duration over a backdrop of what sounds to be LP surface noise. Could it be? Overall, this is an essential soundtrack for the subconscious explorer.

Filed under: New releases, 2004 releases

Related artist(s): Brannan Lane

 

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