Maze & Lindholm, Carillon sans timbre ni marteau – Vol 1, Belgium, Totalism, TTSM 002 limited edtion CD (2023)
In case you’re not completely convinced, Maze & Lindholm is a dark ambient / drone / experimental music project formed by … producer P Maze aka Pierre de Mûelenaere (who happens to be one-half of electronics / noise band Orphan Swords) and fellow Belgian Otto Lindholm. “Carillon sans timbre ni marteau – Vol 1” is the duo’s third album together and, as the title says, is the first of a series of albums exploring compositional processes focusing on cyclical time, each album being essentially a one-track work that can be heard as a loop for as long as you want to keep hitting the Play or Replay pad. Such albums will vary in duration but will probably be not much longer than an hour, though this first work is just under 64 minutes in length. This of course means that this and most future recordings from the duo will be fairly demanding of your time: you’ll need at least an hour free of distractions to give them the deep listening required to do them justice.
Recorded in a renovated watermill in northern rural France, this composition was created using the sounds of a music box, all highly amplified and treated with additional electronics, so you hear all its creaks and other little cracks and bursts of sounds coming from its internal machinery. You hear a fair bit more besides the old music box as well: background tones and rumbles, the odd high-pitched searing drone, something that could be marking out a beat, and maybe even the sounds of your own heartbeat and internal body activity, that colour the composition and turn it into something beyond the flat tones of the music box. I swear, as we come towards the end of the composition, the background rumble and the shrill metallic shriek prod the piece onto a more shadowy, ambiguous path that may end up in a very cryptic space. (Watching the last 25 minutes of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” for the seventeenth or eighteenth time on Youtube while this was playing probably didn’t help.) Yet as you the listener find yourself in some universe you hadn’t anticipated, the music box itself remains unaffected and its bland tones continue its beguilingly innocent melodic ritual.
It is certainly meditative music, and Maze and Lindholm themselves call it “radical meditative music” which in a sense is certainly true: you will not come away unchanged by this experience, no matter how minimalist and sparing it appears at first.