Andrew Thomas – Fearsome Jewel
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Andrew Thomas – Fearsome Jewel
Holdrons Arcade
135A Rye Lane
Unit 11 Holdrons Arcade
London SE15 4ST
United Kingdom
Label: Kompakt – KOM 86
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: Germany
Released: Sep 5, 2003
Genre: Electronic
Style: Abstract, Ambient
New Zealand’s Andrew Thomas fell for the Cologne sound of Pop Ambient and answers with ten musical breezes blown from the coast of New Zealand to the Rhine. A film score composer with festival credits and a former frisbee champion, he lives by the sea and loosely connects to the Involve label. Fearsome Jewel is the beatless, weightless counterpoint to Kompakt’s more driving output, and an ideal softener for the winter months.
If anything here is fearsome, it is the overload of beauty. Thomas refracts sounds and lets them echo, coaxing out textures and suggestions, and the ambience is never static, even as tracks loop round themselves and the piano chords keep shifting underneath. There are clicks, throbs and piano tinks on the second piece, floating bliss on the fourth, a long meditation on the ninth, and a brief glimpse past the veil to close. It is minimalism seen through a high-speed camera: careful peaks and troughs, fractured by repetitive embellishments, with every organic, near-impressionistic nuance glimmering and oscillating. The ten tracks are panes of the same window, looking out over some alien hinterland. A lovely, summery record for anyone who values Loscil, Helios or Eno, and for many one of the finest releases in the Kompakt catalogue.
