Saturday, December 3, 2011

Arp's Soft Wave


ARP's latest record, The Soft Wave is a texturally rich, exploratory record that defines what the word ambient means in 2010. ARP are masters of creating atmospheric tones and ambient arenas in which your mind can wander around in for ages. Creating sonic cathedrals that are bigger than anything built in stone, the songs that make up The Soft Wave are epic and so widescreen they make HD seem insignificant. Minimal, yet complex and large, The Soft Wave is an utterly gorgeous record whose beauty lies in its barely there feel and it's sense of never-ending sounds.

With a sense of classic ambience firmly in check and a modern embrace of the genre in its grasp, ARP so easily create tunes that are wondrous, profound, and tremendous. They manage to do this with so few words and so little instrumentation that the results are simply mesmerizing. In fact, much of The Soft Ware is a playground for your imagination to run wild in you'll find it difficult to walk away from. Even when ARP do manage to eep out a few words here and there, the atmospherics are not lost and the band continue to wrap themselves in swathes of sound that seem to stretch on for days. It's almost as if someone like Can met up with Brian Eno and they've never stopped recording.

Impressively minimal and staggeringly massive in scope, The Soft Ware is a fantastic record that sounds like the best thing your imagination has ever created. Nice stuff indeed that's like aural therapy with a co-payment of $0.

No comments:

Post a Comment