Ambient music in the distant wake of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, inspiring relaxed meditation.
As his fellow Petersburgians have done with great musical success, one of the driving forces behind Show Me a Dinosaur and Somn, Artem Selyugin, releases his Ambient solo project under the moniker hopeyouwell. These musicians have carved their trademarks into musical genres such as Post-Metal, Post-Black Metal, and Blackgaze. Perhaps they need a “pause” from their relentless, melodic music and instead create something reflective and meditative. Either way, their musical creativity is impressive.
When an artist dives into Ambient songs and structures, it is like painting an abstract canvas and letting the viewer/listener create a version that might not be intended by its creator. Even with clues in the titles, the art is not complete before it is interpreted by the audience. This is certainly the case with this 30-minute release from hopeyouwell. One can only sit back, enjoy, be transfixed, meditate, and let your consciousness flow along with the sonics on this album, where the first two tracks musically build up to the two middle tracks before the two last tracks calm down the emotions once more.
Like a slow swelling tide, the Ambient flow slowly appears in bright sonics on “Nighttide”. The sounds are lazily swaying like beach grass on a long, stretched dune, with the distant sound of waves that are softly crashing onto the shore. The darker streak in the sounds might be storm clouds gathering on the horizon with a hint of distant thunder. The Ambient soundscapes, slowly swaying, are transfixing.
The idle, reflective, and meditative music remains floating on the next track, “Lazy Light”, embracing the listener with relaxed, reverberating sounds. Deep in the textures, dark sounds are slowly churning among melodious, brighter droplets.
There is a subtle drop in the sonics when “Sun Print” opens and makes place for a delicate picking, strumming guitar forming a melodic idea to follow throughout the track. The mellowness of the guitar and music is engrossing and induces the listener to reflect and meditate, floating in the rays of the sonic flow as the sun changes the patterns from blue to white as they emerge.
With a guiding track title, “Star Pulse”, the mind might turn to outer space, listening to pulsars beating between miliseconds and seconds. This is the sound of the universe, and the low-end pulsating bass-induced sounds make this heavier than the other tracks, with streaks of light emanating from the pulsating star. With strong, static sonics, the track becomes intense and discordant as it gushes onwards until it fades away with gentle echoes.
The delicacy of the first tracks returns as a relief on “Held Open”, even if the flow is a bit discordant. A low-end melodic sound glides along at the bottom, laying a soft foundation in the vast and textured soundscape. The sounds heave and sink at a slow pace, and then with a subtle change in its stream and more prominent low-end, the track slowly moves the meditative listener into a comfortable lull.
A nearby fog signal opens the last track, “Nothing Urgent” immersing other, brighter elements emerging in the manifold layers. The timbre of the fog signal turns dimmer, and a brighter sound begins to slowly circulate. A subtle change in the flow of the shadeful music induces a meditative assembly of sounds as they grow brighter, circulating more strongly with slow pulses as they multiply. There might be the sense that the dimmer sounds are brooding, and the brighter sounds bring serenity as they all slowly merge in the end.
For one who has followed Ambient and Electronic music since the early 70s, it is quite a change in how this style of music can be made today. While the artists of the 70s and 80s mostly used synths, mellotrons, and other keyboard instruments to create this kind of style, musicians like hopeyouwell, Cliff Ruin, Remaining Warmth, and Noveller use their guitar as the offset to create their textures. Selyugin says he built his music around tape loops and guitar sounds. One has to have a good ear to create such an atmosphere, a slow-motion whirlwind of sounds, and connect them as hopeyouwell does so skillfully.
On an end note, it is worth mentioning that Selyugin also plays guitar on one track on the new release by Remaining Warmth out since June 6th called Before the Years, which is Andrey Novozhilov´s (TRNA) musical project.
