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The Adelaidean — Distant Objects in Soft Focus
(Projekt no#, 2024, DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2024-11-30

Distant Objects in Soft Focus Cover art

A most appropriate title for this super-sized collection of floating ambient pieces, a photographic / art term for images at a long distance that aren’t quite in sharp focus, but instead a bit out of reach of the camera, one that offers plenty of room for the viewer’s imagination to create something around it. When we last heard from theadelaidean, a.k.a. Australian author and sound sculptor Sean Williams, he had just created a collaborative album Parallels with Steve Roach, their first time working together, in fact. Distant Objects in Soft Focus is theadelaidean’s thirteenth album for the Projekt label, adding to that a handful of self-released albums before that and along the way, and his mastery of the ambient sound vocabulary becomes clearer with every new release. Tracks like “Hide Awake,” “Dawn Fades,” and “Cryptid Chorus” offer ample evidence of his skills in the floating realm in a somewhat shorter five-to-seven minute soundbites, but when we hit the first of the long pieces with “Day Dreamt,” the listener can begin to experience some evident physiological changes with an overall calming effect and introspective quieting as the piece takes its time to unfold gently around the listener like a warm blanket on a cold night out under the stars, each moment seemingly connected to all that came before it and all that will follow. With “Melted Memory” we have a shorter piece with more structure and melodic content, while still following the general floating vernacular, shimmering and beautiful. “Gravitic Lens” is the next long-form piece at fourteen minutes, creeping in slowly out of the darkness and bringing beauty, color, and light along with it with deep cavernous sounds filling in the lower registers while sparser elements make regular appearances on high, but it’s the 44+ minute title track that opens into a slow moving dreamworld that evolves through numerous portals as it proceeds, each taking its time to open and define itself, then fade into something new. This is a long album, two hours easily, but if one is following the slow evolutionary ambient path, that’s probably what you want, anyway.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): The Adelaidean (Sean Williams)

More info
http://projektrecords.bandcamp.com/album/distant-objects-in-soft-focus

 

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