Review by rA Recurring Dreams of the Urban Myth (PS 08/54) by Chris Meloche

Sometimes it is difficult to understand why drone-like ambience can be worth listening to, for many their patience and comprehension is deeply scarred by the ability of some people to sit and enjoy the music of a fridge in the middle of a cathedral as a millipede stamps out a rumba. Of course its easy to make this seem like a risible genre and maybe even easier to make poor quality music in this vein which is why when it is good it really stands out. Musicians like Chris Meloche have challenged those with short attention spans and pop sensibilities to produce finely crafted pieces of music that cross the borders between sound sculpture and musical engagement.

This is the earlier of his two FAX contributions, its companion piece being the atmospheric Wireless, and it may be this piece for which he is best known. For a long time I thought it must be a legend that this musical cycle was only an excerpt from an epic six hour long sound sculpture but now we know that this mega-dream exists. What we do know is that this is Loop 6, possibly the last of the six hours.

With nothing stronger than a cup of tea, perhaps a bourbon biscuit, this is music to isolate yourself, to project mental images and enter, for one moment, a space of someone else's idea about what a distillation of the urban soundscape really means. It is hard to describe what this actually translates into in terms of the sounds projected from your speakers but it is largely a set of looped drones interspersed with the sounds of echoing cars and lorries that punctuate the enveloping atmosphere more frequently as the wavering drone proceeds.

One or two environmental sounds stick out in this mire of sound and their sharpness punctures the air and sharpens our attention - what was that? Of course, Meloche could have used any number of sounds as source material for his myth but he has chosen to stay away from clichés by using a simple and minimal sound palette. Like Wireless this concrete fable deserves late night background listening alone, perhaps with a dose of rain. Don't forget the biscuits.

Review by pHonaut
Recurring Dreams of the Urban Myth (PS 08/54)
by Chris Meloche

This recording is some cloudy beatless ambience originally performed by Chris Meloche in London, Canada, and broadcast over the air via one of the local radio stations in the early summer of 1994. The whole composition is 6 hours long, and one might think of it as a sleep concert, which is something I've heard several artists doing in recent years.

London, Ontario is a small town situated between Toronto and Detroit, and one wonders what those urban sprawls would have made of such a minimalist transmission, almost completely devoid of any acoustic landmarks at all. Occupied with looming corporate office buildings and the perpetual hum of automotive ambience, it's almost as if the auras of the two cities were interpolated and processed for the performance.

The piece on the CD is simply entitled "Loop 6" and is an ever-shifting, extremely minimal series of REM-inducing drones, and that's certainly intended as a compliment. I've gotten to be pretty picky about what sounds I sleep to. For me, it takes a skilled composer who really puts thought into the textures and themes used in a longer minimal, drone-style environmental piece such as this to successfully pull it off. Now you can get an accurate taste of what the full-length is like from the excerpt included on the Ambient Cookbook or Fax Compilation. And to be honest, you could mimic having the full disc by just putting that track on repeat mode or programming it to play several times. But in doing so what you might miss out on is the delicate sense of evolution or natural progression that takes place. Of course, even the disc is a condensed ("not compromised") version, but at least because of its length the repetitions (if there are any) are less obvious when you have a 73-minute chunk.

As I understand it, Meloche likes to pool his sounds together and stick to only those chosen sounds once the composition is "set in motion." Here, the mood is thick and genuine, and not overly dark or brooding. Calm and meditative fits well. The mood changes are very slight, with gentle drafts of new tones constantly flowing into the work.

For the Faxophile, this album lies on the organic and earthy end of the spectrum while, say, the 2350 Broadway series is more synthetic and spaced-out. Every now and then in Recurring Dreams, there is something that sounds like the spinning tires of your typical joyriding fool in an underpass, but the sound is so distant and reverberant that it acts more like a sedative then a disturbance. This would be the perfect introduction into beatless ambience or a worthwhile addition to any sleephonaut's electro-acoustic library.