Benjamin Dauer
Burning of WineDistance Recordings
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Benjamin Dauer is a Washington, D.C based musician and composer who has most recently been working on scores for choreographed modern dance pieces, but a qwuick jump off tohs wbsite will reveal an incredibly busyman with all sorts of talents. He has previously released on Distance Recordings as part of the duo Offsets, a long distance collaboration with Scottish musician Dominic Dixon but Burning of Wine is his debut album under his own name and was recorded especially for the label as a free download in either MP3 or FLAC formats.
The album is both spacious and subdued, contrasted with moments of dense sonic intensity. There is a lot of Brian Eno about it, but that's no complaint. It's a strikingly clear sounding album, like Loscil's Endless Falls earlier this year, each tone carries conviction, no matter how slight its presence in the mix; and like Scott Morgan's Kranky labelmates Stars of the Lid (who I have managed to mention twice this week) it's not the kind of gentle ambient that is easy to ingore as background music. Its easy to picture this on the Canadian imprint; the album combines digital production with effected field recordings while the use of a real bass guitar adds a subtle naturally swelling background tone for the melting frequencis to drift against. The combination creates a well balanced contrast between organic and inorganic textures. The deep sub bass pulses, digital drones and high frequency melodic turns have all been given further emphasis by the mastering treatment carried out by James Plotkin, whose rollcall of production duties is like the God list of doom and drone: Khanate, Sunn 0))), Earth, Nadja, Fennesz... Needless to say, this requires headphones to tease out all the subtle shades hidden within it's depth of field, though some well placed speakers should submerge you right into the centre of it's amniotic space.
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