Metal Briefs: Is It Ambient?

To Yawn, or Not to Yawn?

When I first started reading the metal press a few years back, I was surprised to discover just how much the "ambient" music audience seems to overlap the metal audience. But, it turns out, the two genres can have a lot in common, and the lines aren't always clear.

Mamiffer & Circle: Enharmonic Intervals (for Paschen Organ)
4 out of 5 stars

Circle is (apparently) fairly well-known in avant-garde circles, and Mamiffer used pretty much just a piano to put me off listening to music while eating. Put them together, and you'll get the best kind of ambient (more or less), with weird and offensive string noises, choral singing, hypnotic organ melodies, and madman screams.




Ulver: Messe I.X - VI.X
2.5 out of 5 stars

The promo materials said something about this being commissioned by someone for some reason, and had lots of other information. Is that really important? I don't think so, and neither is the name Ulver really that useful to telling you what's in this. It's extremely subdued ambient music that mostly sounds like modern electronic soundtrack, but also has some cello that I would place in the mournful Far Eastern category. It's only kind of interesting.



Lustre: Wonder
3 out of 5 stars

Lustre's Wonder hovers somewhere in a nether realm between atmospheric black metal and dark ambient. You could also make the case that it's funeral doom. I'd say the synths are overwhelmingly the central focus, though, the guitars and occasional whispered vocal being used as one more ambient effect. My first instinct is to be completely dismissive, but the synth melodies and the mood here--I like it, just a little. "Green Worlds" is, at the least, compelling.