Ambient Week ’07–Day 4–Rameses III

Things are slowly thin­ning out here at GPHQ. There is a nar­rowing in the air. I notice that Mike has arranged all his pen­cils neatly on his desk, the first with its finely sharp­ened point pointing away from him, the second toward, him, the third away again, and so on. All placed neatly side by side. He sits for hours and stares at them, as if issuing some kind of chal­lenge. Niina sleeps too much, but none of us dare say any­thing. Who wants to wake the sleeping demon? Joel is defen­sive about his col­lec­tion of toe­nail clip­pings, but hon­estly, none of us have said word one about it. Everyone is focused inward, quiet, con­tem­pla­tive. Biosphere’s Shen­zhou has been playing on repeat for days. Inertia grips us all. But still, someone has to write.

So, here we are in Day 4 of Ambient Week. Today brings with it Rameses III’s Honey Rose, a 6-track EP that report­edly com­prises a sound­track to a “mys­te­rious” short film called Suit­yman. I haven’t per­son­ally seen this film and I am unfa­miliar with Ramses III’s pre­vious output, so that descriptor doesn’t mean a lot to me. But I’ll play along anyhow. Unlike the majority of the three pre­vious albums I’ve men­tioned this ambient week, Honey Rose breaks out of a world entirely instrument/computer-bound and brings in lots of found sounds. It even includes some–gasp!–vocals. Does this mean it doesn’t qualify as an ambient record? I don’t know. Who decides things like that, anyway? To me a record is made “ambient” by the mood it cre­ates, not any stric­tures on what can or can not go into it.

Honey Rose is a lovely tangle of gently strummed and picked guitar, grace­fully panned back­ground drones (both key­board and guitar-based, I’m assuming) and nature sounds–the chirps of crickets, the drip­ping of rain, the rustling of leaves. The album’s cover, with its wind-blown wheat and end­less blue skies, is a fairly accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the sounds within. When vocals appear, they’re soft, sub­dued, lulling–barely intel­li­gible amidst the, well… the ambiance. This is dreamy, beau­tiful stuff. More melodic and struc­tured than most ambient, but still per­fect for a nap in the grass. While I indi­cated that Loren Dent’s album was ideal for twi­light con­tem­pla­tion, Honey Rose feels like an early morning affair, full of promise and hope.

Try:
“Theme Two“
“Theme Four” (via Impor­tant Records)

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