Waves of bleak, ethereal beauty.
Robert P. Beveridge | Cleveland, OH | 03/30/2009
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Karsten Hamre, Broken Whispers (Flood the Earth, 2005)
As I listen to Broken Whispers, I can't help but feel that Karsten Hamre should be a lot better-known among the noise and ambient undergrounds than he actually seems to be. The music on this release is pretty straight ambient, but it combines the muscular, straightforward feel of a band like, say, Cazzo Dio with the orchestral leanings of Hidden-era Caul. Throughout, Hamre injects an atmosphere that I'm relatively sure is supposed to be a cross between majestic and ominous, but to me it's just fun; the whole thing reminds me of a Hammer horror film score, had anyone in the Hammer days decided to experiment with dissonance and static. Is that a good thing? Bloody well right it is. The album, which with only seven tracks has a lot of room for its compositions to stretch their legs, does shine most during the longer pieces here (the nine-minute "When Darkness Falls", the nine-and-a-half "Dioxide Universal"; the latter is the album's quietest track, and the most reminiscent of film music), but the shorter ones are no slouches either; "Fortuna Synapsis", which at 5:18 clocks in as the album's shortest track, could have come right out of the soundtrack for the film Phase IV (and from me, that, folks, is high praise indeed). The album is pretty widely available, both at Amazon (with used copies) and digitally at a number of sites around the web (I can't tell you where because of Amazon's restrictions on external links, but searching the usual suspects should bear fruit if you'd prefer to buy the album in mp3 format); if you're a fan of film-score-style music, ambient, or really quiet noise acts (think Crawl Unit here, for example, or those field-recording albums by folks like Eric La Casa that Ground Fault Recordings was so fond of releasing), you should definitely give Karsten Hamre's work a listen. This is very good stuff. ****
"
Track Listings (7) - Disc #1
