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Through the 1990's most new-school ambient trance music came from labels whose main focus was the dancefloor - psy-trance labels like Spiritzone and Twisted Records , the more mainstream UK labels Lost Language and Hooj Choons, the wonderful Euphoria chillout series and so on. The genre was crying out for a label brave enough to make a bigger commitment to the sub-genre. Enter Vincent Villius and Sunbeam of French-based Ultimae Records, established in 2000 and one of the first labels to champion the genre full time with its "panoramic music for panoramic people". Some of it quite danceable, certainly, but nearly always with the enveloping ambience of psychedelic spacemusic in all its intriguing shades and colours. Liquid sounds and epic panoramas are what Ultimae does best, beginning on the trance axis and spiralling out from there into other genres and into spaces we don't yet have names for. And Ultimae is not just a label, its a fully realised vision - the music, the packaging, the parties. This collective of composers, DJ's, sound designers, visual artists and dreamers have tapped into something profound. If you're not yet a fellow traveler, it's time to get on board. The Fahrenheit Project series offer some of the richest and most intelligent trance-based ambient you'll hear from artists anywhere on the planet, past or present. No other compilation series has captured the sound of the cosmos so consistently well: that unmistakable spectral ambience that only electronically-based music can achieve with its beautiful-strange environments, quiet drama and awed reverence. Fahrenheit Project part 1 is an impressive beginning and makes clear from the outset that Ultimae's definition of trance is open-minded and progressive. Aes Dana (a duo comprising of the label's co-founders) gives us something new and strange with the extraordinary "Skyclad". Its opening oriental flute and eerie background drone could be textbook ethno-ambient until an odd percussive drum loop kicks in and casts its hypnotic spell. Also of note is Craig Padilla's beatless "Beyond Beta", jaw-droppingly beautiful and almost Berlin old-school ala Ashra with its warm, enveloping shroud of shimmering melody and sad synth chords. Fahrenheit Project part 2 is book-ended with two lovely drone tracks from American deep ambient composer Robert Rich - more proof that the various sub-genres associated with club music are not the only ones catching the Ultimae's ears. Highlights in between include Chai AD's spellbinding "When The Effect Came" with its heady mix of acid house buzz, thick trip hop groove, Islamic wailing soaring alien-like synth chords. Swedish duo Vibrasphere's "San Pedro" is profoundly uplifting and great example of their talent for blending pretty acoustic guitar with seriously big, bass-driven techy dub. Fahrenheit Project part 4 is another blinding collection. Puff Dragon's "Chinese Radio" is extraordinarily hypnotic with its slow, thunderous 4/4 rock drums not unlike Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir". Over a simple arpeggio and snippets of Chinese folk melody is a spoken mantra you can't get out of your head: "...perception... reality... perception... reality". Other highlights include Cell's "Audio Deepest Night" which is widescreen ambient trance at its most muted and achingly sad, while respected Polish outfit Aural Planet show their dense, pretty, uniquely intense sound to maximum effect on "Hydropoetry Cathedral". The fifth volume in the series stumbles - too much washed-out reverb and atmospheric fog swirling around a rather big hole where the melodies were supposed to be. It proves to be only a temporary glitch, however, because Fahrenheit Project part 6 finds Ultimae and its artists once again applying their craft with breathtaking finesse. There's nine tracks, some by newcomers like Scan-Tec, others by Ultimae icons Cell, Solar Fields and Aes Dana. "Erasing Pluto" by Cell typifies the tracks in a 4/4 time signature which dominates this particular album; throbbing and sighing and glistening, reveling in gentle tension-and-release dynamics. The acid buzz and squawk of the classic Roland 303 synth makes an appearance more than once, cross-stitched with the newer sounds and all very tastefully done. The album closes on a quiet, folksy note with Hol Baumman's "Radio Bombay" which sketches spare synthetic figures around an Indian vocal with acoustic guitar accompaniment. Yet even here, a bass drone suggesting spaces as vast as the Milky Way lurks in the background. Part 6 finds the series as cosmic as ever. Albedo is Ultimae's first compilation outside the Fahrenheit Project series and quite different from its predecessors despite featuring many of the same artists. The UK composer/DJ Nova compiled and mixed eleven new tracks as an audio diary of sun's arc across the sky from sunrise to sunset. It's a kind of environmental music, then, unified by location recordings and Ultimae's trademark atmospheric washes but with most tracks having enough structure and rhythmic variety to sound distinctive. Powerful contributions by Solar Fields and Sync 24 echo the throbbing Berlin-school ambient trance or yore, a classic sound that seems infinitely open to reinvention in gifted hands. Other tracks sound purely 21st century, like Hol Baumann's "Human" with its intensely percussive tech groove and weird machine cries and noises. Starting and ending with barely a whisper, Albedo is another rich, intelligent example of chill from Ultimae. Oxycanta ia the label's quietest, most deeply "ambient" compilation and less an ambient trance release than any of the others. Imagine walking at dusk or dawn next to a very wide, very deep and very still lake upon which the surface occasionally ripples. You can sense the depths below via the occasional slow beat, deep rhythmic throb or gentle arpeggio. There's a certain power that comes from restraint, from not revealing all, and that's what makes this release so engaging. Regulars like Aes Dana, Asura and Solar Fields are all present and accounted for, alongside talent new to Ultimae from Japan and Sweden. Since Oxycanta in 2006 the label's focus has been mostly on single artist albums rather than compilations. Well worth checking out are releases by Carbon Based Lifeforms, Asura, Cell, Aes Dana and HUVA Network. |
