There are only so many manipulated found sound albums that I can give my time to in life. Many artists in this realm are poor at best and their music isn’t worth the discs that it’s pressed on. This album from Chris Herbert stands head and shoulders over all these pretenders. Landscapes more than soundscapes, the music on Mezzotint is dreamy and rolls around the room like a ghost.
Kranky
Mezzotint appears to be made up of many found sounds shoved through a load of delay followed by more delay. All of the pieces have a deep, resonant drone running through them. Pops, glitches and snippets of the source material emerge throughout the album. It is similar to most of Fennesz’s work but Herbert builds a better atmosphere and is less clinical sounding. It takes a few tracks for Mezzotint to get into the swing of things but once it gets going it is beautiful. "Suashi" expands on the techniques used earlier in the album (drones and glitches) with more aleatory noise and a very low and very slow bass pulse.
There are some less than stellar pieces on this album; "Stab City" and a couple of the untitled pieces don’t do much for me. However, they fit with the rest of the album. On their own I could take or leave them but the album feels incomplete without them. They set the scene for the tracks that are later in the album such as the fabulous "Cassino." It has a glassy sound with bells and watery noises generating a delicate mood and of course the thick but not heavy drone that Herbert uses pretty much all the time. The piece is long but evolves slowly to an almost crystal clear section of the recording of the bell sounds (which sound like a glockenspiel when listened to without all the noise in the way). It finishes off the piece perfectly. In lesser hands this album could be boring but Herbert pulls it off. Even on the track entitled "Let’s Get Boring!" he keeps it interesting. Not much happens in this piece but the overlapping drones sound like crashing waves, there is a natural quality to the heavily processed sound that makes it a joy to listen to.
Despite a rocky start this is a wonderful album. I particularly like the hollow, distant feel to much of the sound. The way Herbert uses echo makes huge segments of the music sound so far away which highlights the tinkering he does in the foreground. This wouldn’t be the best ambient music I’ve heard but it is a damn sight better than the majority of rubbish pushed out at the moment where any hack with a laptop and an hour of free time can make an ambient record.
[Note: the track listing on the back of the album is confusing (and the sleeve itself isn’t that nice to look at, it’s a horrible queasy brown color). There are seven pieces listed but there are 12 tracks on the CD. A little web investigation gives the track numbers corresponding to the titles, the rest presumably being untitled.]
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