Review by rA Wireless (PS 08/69) by Chris Meloche

This disc is so melancholy but I have really grown to like it, it is certainly monochromatic in the sound palette it uses but has a place, for me when I'm working on an article or on a rainy dark evening perhaps.

'In the Air' opens with bubbling electronics and fizzing radiowaves that build and fall at the last moment before the frequencies become too much. Radio tunings are turned backwards in massive washes of treated sound giving the piece a generally sedate generator-like atmosphere that has led some to think of it as Meloche's more mature twin to the now classic monochrome Urban Myth; a disc I have been less at ease with but returned to a number of times.

Almost exactly half way through the disc the 'voices' enter. Meloche manages to produce a sound ecology of aural fragments, pitting the ramblings of a TV melodrama with a radio newscaster and snatches of theme music creating a fleeting glimpse of an imagined urban environment. This may take you by surprise having been lulled into the waves, vibrations and drones of the earlier, more soporific, half.

The final phase of the disc enters a relative calm where rain (or a needle on old vinyl?) falls around our unreal city and the voices give way to bring us back to those cascading flutters and undulating electronics. Perhaps this disc takes some time to adjust to but it pays dividends to a less concentrated form of listening, the atmospheres here are of the isolationist ilk and maybe best experienced on one's own for its full impact to be experienced.