Search - Donnacha Costello :: Together Is the New Alone

Donnacha Costello
Together Is the New Alone
Genres: Dance & Electronic, Pop

Track Listings (10) - Disc #1
1. Slowly Sinking In
2. Awake on the Fifth Floor
3. In Spite of Everything
4. Your New God
5. Daydream Belief
6. That Empty Feeling
7. And I Got Left Behind
8. Nothing, Still Nothing
9. Dry Retch - Donnacha Costello, Costello, Donnacha
10. Always a Part

CD Details

All Artists: Donnacha Costello
Title: Together Is the New Alone
Members Wishing: 0
Total Copies: 0
Label: Efa Imports
Original Release Date: 1/1/2001
Re-Release Date: 10/16/2001
Genres: Dance & Electronic, Pop
Styles: Ambient, Electronica, Techno, Dance Pop
Number of Discs: 1
SwapaCD Credits: 1
UPCs: 718752310420, 718752310413

Synopsis

Amazon.com

On Together Is the New Alone, Donnacha Costello concocts sonic atmospheres that gently fill and alter whatever space they inhabit. The album creates a spare, slow-motion world where audio loops seem to float in the air, interacting with each other in ever-changing ways. On "In Spite of Everything," a sound hovers on the horizon like a glistening star; its luminescence dims as a keyboard part comes to dominate the track. Costello flirts with the silent/near-silent compositions of Francisco Lopez and Bernhard Guenter on the extremely low-volume "Daydream Belief." "Dry Retch" could be a sonic illustration of a gradually unfolding chemical or biological process. The album closes with the melancholy "Always a Part." When Costello lays down some beats a couple of minutes into the track, it's startling. After basking in Together's bliss chamber, "Always a Part" helps the listener transition back to the hubbub of the real world. --Fred Cisterna

CD Reviews

Music for Sad, Sleepless Nights?

Richard Yacuk | Whippany, NJ USA | 12/08/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is about as quiet and minimal as sound and rhythm can possibly get and still be called "music." The rhythms are not much more than the tiniest of white noise and clicks, in the DSP tradition of electronic music of the late 90s and early 2000s. The synthesized sounds are gentle, repetitive, and never pretend to be anything more than synthesized sounds, nothing remotely sounding like a violin or piano. Only the closing track, "always a part" has a familiar sound, that of a very persistent electronic snare drum, layered on top of a repetitive synth progression so reminiscent of Eno's `Music for Airports.' The repetitive nature of the sounds reminds me somehow of the early music of the Cure, also at times touching on hopelessness and despair.

On his album "Together is the New Alone," Mr. Costello has done something unusual in that he's created an ambient music that describes a landscape, but that landscape is perhaps the internal emotional landscape of a hopeless and downtrodden person. Three months later and I simply cannot stop listening.

For more good recent ambient electronic, see also Loscil, "First Narrows""