Synonymous with the word eulogist, the recordings of Encomiast (Colorado resident Ross Hagen) routinely truck in the dark ambient arts, negating the genre's palliative nature, but don't let such broad categorical generalizations diminish the experience: this isn't some comfy Eno-tional rescue. Hagen, who has recorded for many of the underground's finest imprints these last few years (including his sterling 2007 release Transit Bed on the Gears of Sand CDR label), demonstrates that Encomiast's strength lies in the deceptive thrust of subtlety that informs his work rather than the expansive, monochord drones that make up the bulk of many of his colleagues simplistic narratives.
Subtlety isn't this recording's only virtue — Hagen peppers his obtuse environments with a multitude of strange, otherworldly sounds and gestures, creating precipitous mood pieces that upsets the usual onanistic elements characteristic of isolationist musicians pursuing isolationist music in isolation. The opening "Aesthesia" is a case in point: swelling choirs of coarse tones almost assume gigantic proportions before Hagen reins it all back to earth; the affect here becomes one of a door opening and beckoning you inward rather than a thug primed for assault. "Suborbit" also defies the gravitational genre pull towards tangerine dreams or krautrock fiestas: rocket engines misfire and pistons sniffle as strung-out electronic pulses plead to "abort" — this is a piece of music that channels the latent chaos of the Id rather than vacuum calm of space. "Azazel," all due respect to similarly inclined "L" artists such as Lull, Lustmord, or Lagowski, is simply brilliant: the spit of machine exhaust wheezing from ossified pipes wafting over distant piano detonations, clockwork ticking, and the residual waveforms left over from atomic blast waves paint something of a despairing portraiture on face, but all is not just doom and gloom; Hagen's meticulous approach maintains firm control all over the apposite ambient landscape, lest the ugly spectre of industrialism suddenly take over.
Turning Eno's maxim on its head, the lambent burn of Encomiast's tracks beg for attention; they're anti-wallpaper, they compel you to sit back and listen. Unlike the endless purveyors of dark ambient merely trading the amplified sorcery of Gothicized guitars for Lovecraftian circuit-bending, Hagen's thoughtful texturalisms work at right angles, forsaking perpetual horizontal motion. Witness the over 28-minute tour-de-force that is "Concupere," which moves all throughout various permutations of deep-space methodologies — exploding nebula, the clang of fusing radioactive metals, drones reverberating off interstellar monoliths, the shimmer and burr of abandoned sequencers left on automatic — in order to fully grasp what makes this particular Encomiast outing essential listening, "established" ambient mores notwithstanding.
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