Birds Of Tin : Ene - .Key Ray. (Mystery Sea, 2001)

1 Key Nell (5:07)
2 Open Doors (6:41)
3 Paper Lock (12:43)
4 Clear Passage Through (11:16)
5 Thin Walls (0:14)
6 Entry (7:24)
7 Endless Empty (10:07)
8 Key Ray (11:24)

Pour sa première réalisation Mystery Sea fait collaborer Birds of tin (Brooke Oates) et Ene (Scott Hudgins).... Long flot de sons évoluant et muant lentement....

For its first release, the new belgian dark ambient label Mystery Sea has chosen to present eight track composed together by two american projects, Birds of Tin and Ene.
"Key Ray" is a nice album of flowing drones, very surprising for people who, like me, were expecting something far more rhythmic, considering what Ene's "Cost vs Consciousness" album sounds like.
No beats here, but long soundscapes of dreamy tones,
slightly distorted background ("Open doors") and looped basses.
With its relentless droning of distant tunes and very bleak arrangements, this album sounds like a muffled storm, with a lot of bass and heavy elements gathering in the background, while the front sounds, lighter, are flowing nicely.
The CD is instrumental, with the exception of a long sampled ranting in "Paper lock" and "Clear passage through", which made me think a lot of the kind of things Godspeed You Black Emperor! like to sample (think of "Slow riot for new zero Kanada").
Sometimes getting a bit more in a noisy direction ("Paper lock", "Entry"), sometimes silence-like (the short "Thin walls"),
"Key Ray" is an unexpectedly experimental album that combines both very nice atmospheres and a thicker, somewhat heavier side on which the emphasis is more put on the effects applied to a very distant wall of noise than on the calm tones that dominate some of the tracks (like the melodic beginning of "Endless empty", before it gets full of saturated sounds).
Heavy in its atmospheric part and light in the noise, this album is a weird mixture that stays calm but never gets really relaxing, making the listener uncomfortable about wether a storm is going to break out of the dense elements layered on the tracks.
Not as twisted as Wilt, and darker and more disturbing than Liquid Morphine, this is a nice CD for Mystery Sea to present itself, and something that use bleak tones and drones in a personal way (which is all the more surprising when you consider that two differents acts are responsible for this sound).
A very ambient sea indeed, but that is deep and whose waters are not so calm.
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