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from E/I - AUDIO VERITE (INSTALLMENT 1 / February 2007) http://ei-mag.com/verite0001.php#04 FORREST FANG & CARL WEINGARTEN Invisibility (The Foundry) Carl Weingarten and Forrest Fang have been around the block a few times, releasing their own solo work for nigh on two decades. Of the two, Fang's work is better known in most ambient circles, from a decent Projekt release, Gongland, in 2000, as well as guest spot on a piece from Robert Rich's Propagation album (Rich mastered Invisibility). With the epithet "rootless cosmopolitan" applied to himself on his website, Fang has drawn on both Western and non-Western influences, especially Chinese classical music, however the palette here is not notably Eastern-tinged. Invisibility, their first collaboration, is undeniably an assemblage of pleasant and refined atmospheres evidencing proficient soundcraft. Weingarten's chord clouds and light-fingered figures are coaxed by Fang's crystalline synthetic manipulations into vapor trails and sonorous swirls that frequently belie their guitar-driven origins. Fang shows skill in achieving a sense of spatiality simultaneously with a rich fullness of field. "Freezing Days" opens the disc with reverb 'n' delay guitar looping into elegiac phrases tastefully set within Fang's shimmering and sensuous textures. "Hidden Cove" grazes, by way of On Land, along a half-remembered shoreline, with agreeably mellifuous results. As these first few tableaux waft by exuding a vaguely exotic perfume, one is lightly lulled into a blithe reverie; that is, until a creeping feeling starts to nag at the edges of paradise‹one of a certain satiation, a jadedness, a comfort bordering on the uncomfortable, as if a babe happily pampered for a while by warm blankets now sensed the onset of a slow smothering. On "The Land of Invisibility," where a rather too resolved mix gives us the ambient version of the air-guitar/grimacing axe-noodler, Weingarten picking out lead lines and blues-bordering Floyd-esque sustains, near nausea is reached. Two further tracks pass by in unhappy semi-paralysis, "Moon & Dome" doling out texturally flimsy Rich-lite float-sam and "Solar Rain" an over-egged version of a pudding recipe from Eno's ambient cookbook before the situation is thankfully retrieved by the two final tracks, on which the palette is tinted with more incisive tonalities (the almost sequencer-driven "Last Run") or taps into more crepuscular zones, as in the closing "Euphonia." Here, vast amorphous swathes of grainy fibrillation cross the soundfield, freed from the shackles of "instrument." These free-floating timbres of diaphanous layers, stretching and reverberating into endlessnessism, beautifully capture some of the reverberant spatial drift ­ suspended somewhere between the haunted and the mystical‹that is the preserve of space elders Rich and Roach, and take it somewhere else. (Alan Lockett) www.foundrysite.com