#like. objectively good. the flow and the guitar on it. the introspection. the vocal adds a haunting quality

[sn4kebites]

jackman is such a good album. 24 minutes long and every track is so good and so raw. i do not take like most of anthony fantanos opinions seriously anyways but the low score on this one especially was such a bad take.

[fluidsf]

Fluid Label Focus on QUANTUM NATIVES 4 Crown Shyness: Isonautics (2019) Review format: review copy of MP3 download as kindly provided by QUANTUM NATIVES Welcome to a review of the second recent release on the label QUANTUM NATIVES and once again we’ve got another awesome package of music with this album in MP3 download format. As always, QUANTUM NATIVES kindly sent me a review copy of the release via email, including all info and a link to a video for the first track on this album, Glacial Romance. The album we have here is titled Isonautics and is by the artist Crown Shyness. Crown Shyness is one of the aliases used by American artist Kevin Carey. The album description as provided in the email I got is again really interesting and this time in the form of what seems like an abstract narrative written as a fragment of a logbook by a captain of a large ship. The log tells that the ship had capsized during their journey but most importunately it talks about songs as being physical objects, chunks of frequencies. This description of music is derived from the sound of the sea as the title of this logbook fragment suggests and this theme of a journey on a ship combined with waves of abstracted music and musical elements flowing through the sound of the music is what I felt is the driving force of the Isonautics album. Before I move onto my review of the music and the video attached to the album for the track Glacial Romance, I’ll mention that download contains the 13 album tracks in 320kbps/48kHz above CD quality audio, the album cover in good 1100x1100p resolution as several icon files for the album cover and icon of this release on the map of the QUANTUM NATIVES site. Isonautics is an awesome album that is clearly composed like a continuous journey rather than a collection of several pieces as the 13 tracks all quite smoothly connect to eachother. Throughout the album the music switches from glitched and awesomely sound designed and composed melodic tracks with Deconstructed Club elements in them to soundscape like compositions built out of various sounds and occasional musical elements as well. Isonautics starts with Glacial Romance for which cceggyang and Aldéric Trével also made a video. The video features animation from both artists showing an articial landscape that features dark mountains and backgrounds that are changing overtime like architecture and nature blending and morphing together. Abstract rounded figures also feature in the video, like sculpted organisms embodying the sonic elements in a visual form and a fragmented structure made up of blue “Roman” style columns with rectangular roofs on them can also be seen. It’s a great combination of music and 3D animation in which the animation seems to express the musical elements in vision through the evolution and movement in the space but also adds a separate more independent layer of abstraction to the combination through the more alien yet also familiar looking organic rounded shapes. The images that came into my mind while listening to this first track without the music video were more into the territory of the aformention journey with this large ship. The music samples, especially the strings sound a lot like the overture of one of Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen operas and gives the music a quite meditative “infinity” type of ambience. Like the journey on the ship is long and slow but we are passing some gorgeous icy landscape, like traveling through Antarctica by ship. The clicking sounds, chain dangling and bell sounds draw you into the soundscape of the ship and are some wonderful touches to the piece and introduce the album in a great way. Next track Stormborn describes a storm at sea through a soundscape of water sounds, noise effects, low bass rumbles and a jumpy drum rhythm that’s very well composed as well as sound designed blending the mechanical sounds (representing the ship) with the hissy and liquid sounds that represent the storm itself forming an exciting mixture of kinetic rhythms and richly detailed soundscape elements, sounds very convincing like a storm too. Then on Breakwater we have chopped elements of a drone in the same key as Glacial Romance in the first half, but with a glassier filtered tone that’s mixed in between an abstract groove of stuttered time stretched and reverberated drum sounds and sound effects that hints at mechanical sounds of the ship. A great mechanical rhytmscape once again with some lush glassy synth tones at the end. Labor has got this “nocturnal view on a quiet ship” kind of vibe to it, with mechanical clicks, metallic clangs and rock like sounds forming a soundscape that sounds like machinery and clicking chains on the ship without the sound of sea in the background. It’s like the captain is very focused on his ship, listens to the mechanics, checking if there’s no odd sounds of broken machinery audible with his focused thoughts drowning out the sounds of the sea in the quiet night. Spiral expresses a memory fragment of a calm peaceful night on the ship in the night through a looped sound collage of manipulated music samples and mechanical sounds, making for a great mixture of fuzzy musical ambience and metallic machinery sounds. Granite (strain / tension) embraces metallic and digital sonics with a very glitchy chopped up mixture of mangled Footwork like grooves and Bass Music like resonant synth sounds that do also reference the ship again with their hollow decay. A very captivating composition of sound sculptures mixed with almost continuous grooves with a very inspired feeling for both execution and the form that these sounds are in shaped into. Silent Quarries sounds like a melancholic feeling getting expressed through resonances of the ships structure. Resonant vibrating metal surfaces shaping shifting tones and drones that conjure up a mysterious sense that the ship is alive, as a being of its own. The filtered tones in the first half of the piece also add an organic vocal quality to the textures created on the piece that creates this awesome feeling of both organic and metallic materials creating melodies of their own, deep into the night. On the short piece Tread Well, a catchy guitar melody is tinkling from what sounds like a frame of metal springs vibrating which moves into a low pitched mechanical sound, which leads directly into Cut From. Cut Form is a continuation of Tread Well in which you can hear all kinds of mysterious ghostly low shifting sounds as well as less processed sounding bits of a guitar melody which are combined with chops of acoustic drum sounds, clock sounds and various flying sound effects. The piece sounds a bit like you’re hearing the soundtrack of a moment in time when the captain of the ship is struggling to steer the ship in the right course and time goes by (the clock sounds) as he’s thinking and communicating with the outside world what to do in this uncertain situation when he’s unsure where he is anymore and where he is heading in this ice-cold dark nocturnal seascape. Leak is a great abstract Glitch piece that has some of the classic elements of the style, like several sections containing series of short phased impulse ticks but there are also much more metallic sounds and stuttered percussion loops in here too as well as pitch manipulated vocal samples. Overall the piece is a great glitchscape combined with some more rhythmic samples of chopped crystalline sound and synth outbursts. Then on Thrash we have a short piece consisting of resonant stuttered manipulated vocal music samples, like impulses of strange shiny metallic matter. Home of Depths moves quite deep into the nocturnal sea journey ambience and also features a more continuous rhythm and progression than the pieces before, moving into a more gradual type of evolution of the music. With a more subdued ambience the music gorgeously explores the icy seascape outside with distant drones, crystalized resonant tones, combined with some really catchy jumpy mechanical percussion rhythms. There’s also some more extreme dynamics in the piece with some percussion elements (like a laser like sound) spiking out at some points and the differences in distance between the percussion and drones and resonances in the background bring a great depth to the music, making this perfect music for nocturnal introspective deep listening. Final track Roguelike (perpetual light) starts off with a quite loud melodic richly textured ambience but afterwards moves into a mysterious deep ambience of hollow tones, reverberating mechanical sounds and a minimalist slow melodic pattern on glassy crystal synth. Various quirky synth effects also twirl around in the quiet nocturnal ambience. Quite eerie but also calming, this subdued but also richly detailed piece forms a great quiet ending to Isonautics that works as a great point of rest after the sometimes intense abstraction from the music before. Isonautics by Crown Shyness is an awesome album of imaginative deep and well composed and sound designed soundscapes and abstract experimental music. The album’s concept and especially the references to both the captain’s log about the concept of music as being objects of accumulated frequencies and the abstracted back story about the ship help to guide you into this album’s nocturnal journey through an icy seascape full of details, memories, mixed clusters of sound and musical elements blending into new sonic shapes. The album’s tight tracklist also helps as the 13 tracks playing after each other really smoothly flow from one into another bringing you to a variety of sonic pictures and keeping the album coherent as a whole. Combined with cceggyang and Aldéric Trével’s excellent music video for the track Glacial Romance I highly recommend you to check out this album. This is an especially great listen if you’re a fan of contemporary abstract electronic music that experiments with Club elements, if you like Glitch infused soundscapes or if you’re looking for a nicely varied experience of quality underground Electronic music that freely moves from abstract experiments to more recognisable melodic and rhythmic pieces. Highly recommended. Go check this out. The MP3 download released on QUANTUM NATIVES is available here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/srrbwu4irzs1ymi/Crown+Shyness+-+Isonautics+%28QNR024%29.zip?fbclid=IwAR0-43HBPS3ZFssTkTpqD7Hqz8to9g7sD1nHnJaLQWhHPYrkOvQ7Gx_ani0 Watch the video for Glacial Romance by cceggyang and Aldéric Trével here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=pgurUcMHEPA