Thomas Köner - Permafrost

Music is a bubbling pot of emotions. If you throw out an adjective, there's probably a band, album or song. Desolation, euphoria, nostalgia, dread, these have all been done thousands of times with various degrees of success.

Thomas Köner makes empty music. Music devoid of emotions. Ambient drones, consisting of cold field recordings and very low synths. There is no pain, no joy here. Köner creates a world unlike any other, where even sound barely exists.

He doesn't make easy music either. In fact many would be quick to decide it's not even music, even that it's mainly silence. Köner's drones consist of whistling wind like noises, low cold bass and the occasional snatch of a crystalline synth. Köner doesn't make music for the end of the universe, he makes music that is only heard after the universe has imploded, brief echoes of what once was.

Yet despite it's lack of emotions, it's very captivating. Listening to it is almost a hypnotic experience, as you feel your surroundings dissolve and fall apart around you. The album is short for ambient as well; under 40 minutes, but it's the perfect length, meaning the album never feels too long. Permafrost is an almost perfect album, one that shows us a place too dark to put into words.

http://www.mediafire.com/?zyj5yjimkuy

William Basinki - The Disintegration Loops

First off, this isn't an easy album. There is two tracks, one ten minutes, the other over an hour.

And unlike most extremely long tracks, it doesn't feature radicle genre hopping, sound changes or pace. In fact the first track consists of a 10 second beautiful string loop, repeated again and again for over an hour.

And there lies the genius of this album. Each time the loop is played, a tiny bit is snipped out, disintegrated. By 2o minutes that loop is fragmented, it crackles and stutters like a broken down car. By 40 minutes much of the loop is silence, filled with the echo of the strings, only broken by the howl of strings as the beg to break from this cage. By the time the piece is finishing, what's left is a shadow of the loop at the start, a shattered, disorientated piece of music.

Some have compared the loops disintegration to human aging. Others to the process our memories are destroyed by our own bodies. Basinki seems to have created a replicate of life here. Day after day of the same things, repeated and repeated, until everything begins to fade and the silence washes over.

Yes this album will take multiple listens, and definitely requires the right mood. But eventually this music experiment will reward you. One for the night-time philosophers.

http://www.mediafire.com/?13onh025ogqaqs7