| Product: |
From Within Vol.1 - Richie Hawtin |
| Date: |
02.12.06 (73 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Glorious early 90s electronica by two genuine pioneers
Disadvantages: Might be hard to find
Brain child of Pete Namlook (aka Peter Kuhlman) and Richie Hawtin, From Within was one of the first albums that alerted me to the joys of electronica and thus has a very special place in my musical heart.
Pete Namlook, for those that have never encountered him, is a virtual electronica factory, at one point churning out an album almost once a fortnight and released on his independent Fax label. His work is wide and occasionally inconsistent. He has collaborated with innumerable musicians, many of which are of the highest order, such as the grandmaster of krautrock Klaus Schulze, Geir Jensen (aka Biosphere), Bill Laswell, Tetsu Inoue, Bobby Bird (aka HIA) and Jonah Sharp (and the list goes on and on). Pick up a Namlook CD and you can find yourself listening to anything from world music to experimental, minimalist ambient to early trance to almost anything else.
I’m not as knowledgeable concerning Richie Hawtin. Apart from his collaborations with Namlook and the occasional Plastikman album (Hawtin’s illbient, or ambient/minimalist techno, sideline) I’m not really a Hawtin fan, though he something of a renowned figure in the Detroit techno scene.
From Within is the first of three collaborations, the second album being From Within II and the third, wait for it… yes, you guessed it: From Within III (though it is subtitled Silent Intelligence). It is for me the best of the lot and it’s not just nostalgia talking here. It is the most integrated of the three albums, there seems to be a balance between Namlook and Hawtin, whilst FWIII seems to lean a little more towards the techno side of things, which I am not as great a fan of as I am ambient and electronica.
So what is it about From Within that got under my skin and helped direct my conception of music and what I could and do like?
From Within is accessible, first and foremost. It’s got a very analogue sound. As a friend pointed out, it’s just old enough so that we’ve bypassed digital and analogue is coming back into fashion (ala Motohiro Nakashima), and so dating back to 1994 it seems more modern than it might have done six or seven years ago. But that wasn’t it at all. When I first listened to From Within I didn’t think in terms analogue or digital or, more correctly, I didn’t think about either. I was used to listening to some rock (mostly the odd stuff) and a little classical (mostly Bach and a little Beethoven) but having explored prog-guitarist-per-excellence Robert Fripp, I came across (completely by chance) a track by Klaus Schulze on which Fripp played, which lead to a collaboration between Schulze and Namlook, which lead me to From Within.
Phew, a bit of a trek that.
Thus From Within, arguably, has the power to make converts, albeit (hopefully) discerning ones.
But the music:
From Within breaks down into five tracks, mostly pretty lengthy (though none ever feel particularly long, which is always a very good sign). The album flows beautifully and most of the tracks lead one into another. That is not to way that each track doesn’t exist in its own right. There is a great sense of continuity across the album but there is also great difference. The firs track, the wonderfully titled Snake Charmer is a glorious 13 minutes of swirling ambience. But that is just the base. Above the ambience there play innumerable rhythms. It begins gradually, atmospheres swirling, analogue synths cutting swathes across the ether, beats enter, further echoing beats, additional rhythms slide across the two. Then: silence, a single rhythm takes hold then we slide back into the multilayered rhythms of before. This is a pattern across the album, the layering of rhythms and sounds, of different types of beat and sound, which give way to moments of greater serenity and calm, not to mention simplicity. One of the great strengths of From Within is its ability to drop everything and glide from multilayered rhythm and drop into a single drone, upon which a new, single rhythm cuts, which in turn leads us back into what we have heard before, into the familiar.
In this way Snake Charmer is an epitome of the entirely album, a microcosm of what will come after it. It is equally epitomic in that like the rest of the album it is a hypnotic experience. The multilayered rhythms and alternating ambient drones and sequencing never jars the listener but instead pulls them. Snake Charmer is exactly the correct title as Namlook and Hawtin are charming their listener, they’re drawing them out of their basket and into the open, into the air to listen to their music, and there is something in the sound of the atmospheric drones that is reminiscent of breathing, it has that regularity and clarity about it.
Snake Charmer leads seamlessly into Sad Alliance. Usually I think of Snake Charmer and Sad Alliance as a single piece of music as it seems entirely of a piece, whilst also entirely a piece of the album. Sad is certainly the case. Something in the opening drone, in the slow rhythm, in the deep bass that ululates throughout the track gives a sense of being lost in a void. There is a sense of fathomless space (the next track is called: A Million Miles to Earth not without reason). Much of the droning and swathes of synth reinforce the great sense of opening infinitude before us, but once again this is not an alienating experience but one that draws us in and slowly gives way a sense of awe and wonderment, like the removal of fear to be replaced by beguilement.
The sense of void and aloneness is mirrored in A Million Miles to Earth, which opens with simple piano, often just a single note echoing in the depths of nothingness, which give way to spiralling, echoing, lone electronics that seem like minute passing objects in space moving away from us. That is, if in space we could be heard to scream. A Million Miles to Earth takes up nearly half the album at a whacking 29 minutes, but the lone introduction gives away to a warm, slow synth rhythm that again has a hypnotic quality that builds on the simple introduction. It gives a sense of peace and again of the loss of fear at something infinite, intimidating and terrible. It builds over time, embellishing the original rhythm to the point of crescendo, travelling, cascading through the endless space then, just as we have built gently up to crescendo we slow down into:
Homeward Bound. Unsurprisingly we are coming closer to the end of the album. We also return slightly to world of Snake Charmer and Sad Alliance. The analogue rhythms we first hear seem to echo those in the first two tracks, whilst the electronics echo A Million Miles to Earth. But we then move in a unique direction where there is both familiarity and originality. Homeward Bound feels comfortably similar to what we’ve heard but seems infused with a sense of hopefulness, of the sense of returning. There is more percussion, more obvious rhythm than A Million Miles to Earth. It is electronica that is more toe-tapping though just as beguiling and hypnotic as before, filled with sequenced rhythms that layer upon one another whilst, touching the halfway mark home, there is a moment reminiscent of the most catchingly rhythmical moments in Namlook’s Air 2, which always, don’t ask me why, makes me think of strawberries! Nevertheless, it is a gloriously rhythmical and energetic turn of events, celebratory and warm: inviting us forward but we are to be stymied!
Lost. The final track returns us to the echoing void, to careful and distant drones: an analogue drift back into space. For three minutes we are lead back into the void, but do not lose heart it feels right. Moreover, if you immediately listen to From Within II you can hear the sudden continuity, it runs almost straight into it.
But have I said why this caught me? Well, any music, any piece of art that has the power to be hypnotic and enthralling always pulls me in and From Within is most certainly that. It is also a holistic experience, best listened to as an entire album rather than track by track. It’s no concept album but like a lot of electronica you have to allow it time to unfold, for the rhythms to begin to move, for sounds throughout the album to differentiate and also to echo, for motifs to disappear, to be replaced, to reappear. There is joy to be had in the repetition of what we like but also the sudden interruption by the new, the unique, the different.
In short a beautifully ambient album but also with some great rhythms. It is atmospheric without ever being slight. Drones and atmospheres in ambient music can be a pain as it’s a fine line between the enthralling and the downright dull. Part of what is so remarkable about From Within is that it complete manages to negate dull and remains forever enticing whether in a moment of multilayered rhythms and textures or in a moment of void, when there seems almost nothing to fill the space. But there always is.
Anyone interested in travelling further through the void might best be served downloading From Within from either iTunes or eMusic (if you’re a member).
Summary: Glorious early 90s electronica by two genuine pioneers
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