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BALMAT 011LP
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Balmat has always been careful not to call itself an ambient label. But with the 11th release, the label turns its ears -- proudly, blissfully -- to a strain of ambient at its most timeless. The appropriately titled Dreams & Whispers comes from Warsaw's Bartosz Kruczyński, who has recorded under a number of guises, Earth Trax, as well as his own name. Over the years, he's touched upon deep house, breakbeats, acid, techno, electro, IDM, and more; often, the throughline running through a given album is simply the refusal to remain in any one place for long -- well, that, and his unusually nuanced ear for harmony and texture. Those qualities come to the fore on Dreams & Whispers, which might be the most focused encapsulation of Kruczyński's atmospheric sensibilities to date. Across 14 stripped-down tracks for shimmer and pulse, Kruczyński evokes overlapping styles in ambient -- warm vibraphones, taut arps, massing strings, lonesome delay chains -- but always with his own twist. Fitting the album's title, the album is loosely divided into two distinct moods: The A-side, "Dreams," is charged with subtle movement, rhythms spreading out like rings around skipped stones, while the B-side, "Whispers," plunges into a zone of shadows and hush. The two complementary moods flow into one another like the faces of a Moebius strip, yielding an album that's intuitively shaped and rich in emotion. Balmat is a label with a cloudy outline. Jointly shepherded by Albert Salinas and Philip Sherburne, two friends living in Cardedeu, Catalonia, and on the Balearic island of Menorca, Balmat grew out of Lapsus Radio, a weekly show born almost ten years ago. Balmat's mission is simple: to foster new ideas, expand upon personal obsessions, and put enveloping sounds out into the world.
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GBR 019LP
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Birdsong and bright mornings announce the arrival of spring, and Growing Bin Records celebrate the season of rebirth with the return of a hardy perennial. In the three years since he introduced the world to his Baltic Beat (2016), Bartosz Kruczynski has traded dub techno, Berlin electronics, and jazzy Balearic on a string of highly-regarded labels. Now the Polish musician is back in the Growing Bin Records, ready to take you on another audio adventure through the meadows and forests of his native land. Vivid LP opener "Pastoral Sequences" leads you down the garden path, around the lakeside and across the train tracks, striking a cinematic tone as gentle piano and subdued synth tones drift around natural field recordings. Dip a toe in the stream and feel the breeze between your fingers as you stroll towards the Balearic brilliance of "In the Garden", a carefree cooler built on a subtle bossa rhythm, serene chords and chiming mallets. Bartosz reprises the aquatic grandeur of his first Baltic Beat on the immersive "Petals", a selected ambient work where tangerine pads underpin interlocking electronics and stately keys. Guitars ring out, Reich's mallets ripple and well-tempered piano drift over a thick sequence as "Voices" propels you to the halfway point with soft power. The B side opens with the delicate hypnotism of "If You Go Down In The Woods Today", a modern minimalist masterpiece alive with circular mallets and sultry woodwind, before "The Orchard" paints an impressionistic vignette from the same palette. Shifting focus but not feeling Kruczynski takes you home "Along The Sun Drenched Road" in two stages; the first a gorgeous combination of the acoustic and electronic where hints of dub techno sit beneath languid piano notes, the second an Eastern-tinged reprise of the album's opening and a welcome return home before the storm breaks.
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