Celer
Cursory Asperses
AUSTRALIA ROOM40 RM4233 CD (2024)
Celer was the American musicians Will Long and Danielle Baquet who were only operative for a few years, 2005 to 2009, but produced a significant amount of music in that time, often self-released as cassettes or CDRs; Discogs suggests a total of nearly 200 full-length albums in that time alone. Today’s item is a reissue of a 2008 CDR which originally came out on Slow Flow Rec., and the label owners are fully convinced of the cultural achievements and stature of Celer in the fields of “ambience, texture and atmosphere”.
We’ve found some solace and enjoyment in Celer’s extremely minimal and meditational work in the past, but we’ve only heard a tiny portion of the corpus. I have vague memories of Celer using loops, mixing desks, and field recordings to realise their work, but the finished results often remained inscrutable, with most traces of their creation effaced. Cursory Asperses is no exception. We’re told it’s based on field recordings of water (from rivers, lakes, pools, etc.) mixed up with keyboards and bowed instruments; in his liner notes, Will Long details the process by which he used software to process and transform and layer his recordings. A skilled sound artist, he can tell you exactly how high tones and low tones are co-existing (or otherwise) in the sonic eco-system he’s carefully building, but this doesn’t prevent him from rhapsodizing about the mysteries of nature.
His takeaway seems to be that the flow of a river may be completely meaningless, despite what we would like to think; perhaps on Cursory Asperses, he’s attempting to propose a structure that suggests otherwise, but it’s a very nebulous structure. (02/02/2024)