Exposé print issues (1993-2011)
Drifting in Silence — Winters Past
(Labile Records LAB-671532, 2024, CD / DL)
Drifting in Silence / Suseti — Echos Beyond
(Labile Records LAB, 2024, DL)
by Jon Davis, Published 2025-01-17
American musician Derrick Stembridge has interests in a number of different types of music, primarily differing varieties of electronic music, and uses different names to release them. Drifting in Silence is one of those, the one that we’ve encountered in the past here at Exposé. But like Dirk Serries with his multiple personas, Stembridge is also Long the Night and — oddly enough — Derrick Stembridge, both solo and in collaboration with others. I can think of multiple reasons why this is a silly thing to do, and I’m sure others can come up with reasons why it’s smart, but it is what it is, and here we’ve got two recent releases under the DiS name. In his review of Desire (2014), my colleague was put off by the prominence of danceable beats that he felt lowered the music out of the realm of creative electronics and into mere clichéd club fodder. If dance beats were one of the defining characteristics of DiS music, that was just a phase — you’ll hear none of that on Winters Past. This is not quite ambient music, at least not of the drifting abstract kind, though it’s certainly headed in that direction. There are melodies at times if only implied, and chord progressions on piano-like keyboards (real or otherwise), so parts of this strike me as being in (or near) the New Age genre. I say this not so much to categorize the music as to provide impressions that readers can use to determine their own interest. Given the vast number of artists in the field of ambient electronic music these days, I can decisively say that Drifting in Silence is one of them. I don’t know what criteria listeners use to separate the good stuff from the chaff, so all I can say is that Winters Past is calming and contains nothing that will interrupt your meditation or slumber or whatever it is you do when listening to it.
For Echos Beyond, Stembridge is working with Sunil Sharma, AKA Suseti, on four relatively brief tracks (all under five minutes). The result is further along the path toward pure ambience, with less structure to the discernable notes and little consistency to the odd noises you hear occasionally. For me, this is definitely the kind of music where my reaction depends on my mood and what I’ve been doing. I’ve played around with digital reverbs (both hardware and software) enough to recognize what’s going on to produce much of what’s heard, but I’ll grant that in the right situation, this sound is exactly what I need.
Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases
Related artist(s): Drifting in Silence
More info
http://driftinginsilence.bandcamp.com
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