: foundry indices : reviews : sounds : : : news : pictures : words : : : the foundry : hypnos REVIEWS from Igloo Magazine 11/2004 http://igloomag.com/ written by Mark Teppo, Contributing Editor Jonathan Hughes :: Fluidities (Foundry, CD) "...Jonathan Hughes has realized a very unique vision with Fluidities. While the individual tracks are minimal and sparse ambient excursions, the possibilities explode when the tracks are combined with each other and the sonic experience becomes an exercise in close listening..." Fluidities may look like a double CD ambient release lying there on your desk -- with two full hours of expansive headspaces in which to get completely lost -- but Jonathan Hughes has actually compiled these tracks specifically to be stacked atop one another. Each of the twenty-two tracks is approximately six minutes in length and half are by Hughes or Hughes and a collaborator and the other half are by recognizable names in the ambient field -- Tetsu Inoue, Saul Stokes, M. Bentley, Ian Boddy, Ambient Temple of Imagination and Dean Santomieri to name a number of them -- and while you can certainly listen to them in serial or in random patterns, the real depth and mystery becomes clear when you follow the specific directive of the release and overlap the tracks. Fluidities is the infinite possibility of combination and recombination waiting to be unlocked by your clever little fingers. I pulled a random playlist from each CD and ran them simultaneously, immediately losing touch with what element came from which track. The texture of the ambience that swirls around you in definitely denser: washes of sound envelop tiny particles of space noise, long tones are pushed along by the irreverent rattle of tiny percussion, drones are compressed and broken up by granules of glitch, and glacial piano melodies drench tiny bursts of processed field recordings from suburbia like the slow fall of winter snow. There are 121 distinct combinations of two-layered compositions (and endless more when you stack them deeper) and here are just a few of the pairings I that I tried. The gentle melodies of High Skies' "The Shipping Forecast" find a complementary rhythm in the desert sand percussion of Jonathan Hughes & Naryan Padmanabha's "Feel the Photons" while the combination of Saul Stokes' "Summer" and dreamSTATE's "Molten" sizzles with the extra burden of heat coming off the commingling of the tracks. The dictaphone salesman of Hughes' collaboration with Hussalonia says, "We are getting a lot of disturbing sounds" just as the first swell of deep ambience space noise from Hughes' collaboration with David Mussen ("Two Thirteen") bursts out of the speakers, and later tones play against slow strings in a ready-made duet. An unconscious ebb and flow between elements rises from combining Susanne Brokesch's "Hostile Phone" with Tetsu Inoue's "Soft Dome," as the brittle tones of Brokesch's track break apart, Inoue's drones become heavier and drift closer to the foreground. Jonathan Hughes has realized a very unique vision with Fluidities. While the individual tracks are minimal and sparse ambient excursions, the possibilities explode when the tracks are combined with each other and the sonic experience becomes an exercise in close listening. Everything is possible, nothing is true with this one release. I randomize again and it is a completely different record. You must explore. Fluidities is out now on Foundry Records. http://igloomag.com/doc.php?task=view&id=839&category=reviews