A Closer Listen
It’s interesting when music with limited activity ends. The breaks between songs on an ambient album seem more jarring. There is often so little there to begin with. It’s too easy to let your mind wander. To lose track of the sound. Making its disappearance all the more disconcerting.
Such was my experience with Pavel Milyakov and Lucas Dupuy’s HEAL EP, which was released earlier this year. HEAL is a gentle record. Although comprised of only six compositions it stretches for nearly 51 minutes, all gentle washes of electronic sound interspersed with the occasional field recording which range from more percussive (albeit still delicate) clanging and rustling, to the natural sounds of chirping birds and wind.
The second track “path,” is a a standout, opening on the sounds of chirping birds and rushing water, before a subdued, calming synthesizer undulates up and down and the sound of distant bells rings its own occasional melody. Some tracks are more active. “Deep gtr” has a foundational energy, a distant, regular rhythm undergirding another burbling atop it.
The tropes of New Age and environmental music are omnipresent on HEAL in the best way, there is even a prominent use of pan pipes on “05 flutes of doom.” It’s an album that manages to feel both familiar and fresh.
The album is another product in the ongoing collaboration between ambient musician Milyakov and multimedia artist Dupuy. As with many collaborative albums in the 21st century, the product was mediated by technology, with the two artists trading materials digitally, a process that saves both space and time. But HEAL is marked by technology in another way, at an even deeper level; the field recordings and synthesizer improvisations heard here were in part assembled into compositions with the help of custom-built software.
As a digital skeptic, I found it initially disquieting that the music was in part the product of combinations made by something other than human, but the tracks on HEAL really work. They feel original in a way too much ambient music in the age of its ubiquity does not. By the time one arrives at “end,” the 18 minute album closer, those pauses between tracks that seemed so jarring at the beginning of the album disappear as the drone of lush synthesis overwhelms. (Jennifer Smart)
Fri May 30 00:01:00 GMT 2025