An Auxiliary View
“An Auxiliary View,” the new album by Ümlaut, is an evocative meditation. The peaceful interplay of sounds evokes a hypnotic sense of movement. The listener is lured into a mind vehicle propelled by serenity and beauty, a journey unimpeded by the physical limitations of travel. Working in a lineage of musique concrète anchors one in the moment. Abstract, beat-less themes and atmospheric percussions interweave throughout the ambient drift and sizzling sound. Soothing synth tones, soulful vibrations and reverb-drenched chords floating in and out of the stereophonic field contribute to the metallic and blissful soundscape. As with most Ümlaut albums “An Auxiliary View” skirts most genres. The big differences here are textural and emotional. The micro-chopping and rearranging of barely recognizable sounds, which appear and disappear as otherworldly threads, twist and disentangle simultaneously, which makes the album feel brand new and fully known. Surrendering to the highly detailed textures, timbre and weightlessness of its alchemical sound-blending makes for a listening experience infinite with possibilities.
Tracklisting:
- In exchange, offering
- Nuances and shudders
- Conceived by walking
- Gaze back into you
- In heaven, all
- When work speaks
- Always some reason
- Chaos within you
- Attacked by ideas
- Emptier, simpler
- Sheet of paper
- Rose in the abyss
Ümlaut
Ümlaut is Jeff Düngfelder, a U.S. experimental composer/sound artist now based in the northern Connecticut countryside. The thematic concepts distinguishing his work are absence and silence; the ineffable exchange between viewer and image; random moments of stillness within a landscape in flux.
Using a minimalistic, electro-acoustic approach, his elusive patchwork of field recordings and electronics merge with the world of shadows and colours. Allowing for infinite possible interpretations, he lets the listener’s imagination fill in the blanks between the grainy textural sounds with elements of ambient, musique concrète and noise. Combining spaciousness with a sense of intimacy introduces a musical language of experimental ambience. His memory recordings expose the complex relationship between music and silence.
Reviews
Silence and Sound
Ümlaut (aka northern Connecticut-based Jeff Düngfelder) elevates An Auxiliary View, delving light years into transparent soundscapes, expansive musique concrète, microscopic glitch mechanisms, and static pulses for the consistently adventurous Audiobulb imprint. These dozen captivating audio Polaroids manage to inhabit finer fragments and fluctuating fissures that Düngfelder meticulously expands upon. “In exchange, offering”‘s bubbling synth swells drive home this message where darker soundtrack elements surround us, as “Gaze back into you”‘s minuscule field recordings are looped into a repetitive and melodic pitter-patter sequence that eventually transforms into a cinematic supernova midway through.
An Auxiliary View delivers a perspective that looks at the world from a tangential angle. Its tracks range from the exploding auditory wonder and gloom of “When work speaks” to the more upbeat yet undulating beauty of “Always some reason.” The album simply ebbs and flows in all the ways that we find comforting (and baffling) as Ümlaut focuses on intricate otherworldly strata. Where hundreds of found sounds are condensed into solitary and surreal collections, all the brittle bits and bobbles of life migrate into a singular whole. Modern classical segments brush against grittier contours and snapshots of nostalgic images that we didn’t realize were right in front of us the whole time.
Closing with a four chapter series of tracks all titled “Attacked by ideas,” Düngfelder gathers a diverse and intricate stream of broken noises, glitch sound bytes, and ambient whirs, barely grazing the surface of a smorgasbord of deftly woven sequences evoking complex dreamlike moments. “Surrendering to the highly detailed textures, timbre and weightlessness of its alchemical sound-blending,” An Auxiliary View is a perplexing and beautiful sonic panoramic of epic proportion.
Original > HERE
Silence and Sound
Jeff Düngfelder , aka Ümlaut, continues his work as a sculptor of textures, constructing moving atmospheres with mineral poetry.
An Auxiliary View is a journey into futuristic lands, where crystal mountains release whirlpools of microscopic matter from their snow-covered glaciers.
The melodies form cities of compact transparency, impermanent walls of incandescent ephemerality.
Ümlaut is the architect of suspended worlds, placed on the edges of an infinity crossed by invisible materials.
The molecular-looking structures float in a magma of intertwined filaments, around spheres that have escaped from a space-time with desynchronized circular movements. Fascinating.
Roland Torres
Original > HERE