For Still Valley Mirror mainstays Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemanncollaborated with Jim O'Rourke between May, 2002 and January, 2004.Much of Mirror's output has suffered from prohibitive pricing and/orfrustratingly limited runs but thankfully CD re-issues such as these can bring the music to more masses.Die Stadt
The disc comes in an olive green die-cut sleeve with a kitty-shaped cutaway and the inner sleeve has photos of aged small town buildings set in a forested valley. Thus, the music seems to be an encomium of a particular "still valley," but certainly transferable to the many others that still pepper the world. There are three tracks, the original two from the LP being over nineteen minutes in length and the one in-between being about nine and a half minutes. All are of the same aesthetic as oscillating drones turn over ever so slowly and smoothly while indeterminable bits of sonic minutiae accentuate the movement.
While many Mirror albums fill a room with an aura just shy of nothingness, this one is a little more forward but still brimming with the same sort of space and analog warmth. Pure ambient field recordings might have been more evocative of a valley but these pieces are wholly beautiful in their own. There is a timelessness to this music that equals the stillness of the valley. Chalk and Heemann have all but mastered their art.
No word just yet as to what's next from Mirror, but Chalk has since released The River That Flows Into The Sands and Heemann has begun a new project with Timo Van Luijk called In Camera.
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