COLLECTION

'Isolationism' - it predated the use of 'illbient' to mean much the same thing - grew from the darker elements of ambient, and was an influence on subsequent trip-hop and the scarier aspects of drum'n'bass, which was at the time the apotheosis of hip. All of the tracks here are guaranteed to unsettle the listener; the ultra-square seriousness of the musicians is either a massive turn-on or slightly risible, depending on your mood. No less than four of the artists have umlauts in their name, all of them legitimate. Only the Aphex Twin seems to have his tongue in his cheek ('Aphex Airlines', hard to find outside this compilation - which is itself hard to find - is a long, long screech).

The music is mixed together effectively and the inlay notes give sources, which is handy. Disco Inferno's 'Lost in Fog' sounds like a conventional indie-synthpop tune put through a big echo unit, O'Rang's 'Little Sister' has a lovely violin bit in the middle of it, 'Aphex Airlines' is a high-pitched eeeee which you will not finish, Total's 'Six' is six minutes of errrr, and the rest merges in my brain. More than one track starts off very quietly and builds slowly and then stops dead; several of them have reverb. James Plotkin's 'Lost' seems to have been chosen as an echo of the first track on 'Ambient 1', which was by Brian Eno; they sound similar and have a similar structure, but Plotkin's music is creepy.

Ultimately this album is very hard to love. It works best in the dead at night as background - it is 'ambient', after all. It makes for a fantastic sampler of names dropped at trendy parties; just remember than an umlaut makes a letter go 'oooh', in which case 'Paul Shutze' is actually 'Paul Shoots'.

Although this was the last 'Brief History of Ambient' releases, Virgin continued the series with releases by Edgar Froese, Shutz, Total, and Techno Animal (along with Disco Inferno, the name is ironic), as well as David Toop's well-received 'Ocean of Sound'.

5 out of 5

Mr. A. Pomeroy (courtesy of Amazon.com website)

Once upon a time, I heard some mysterious samples of this album. But I had no idea what album it was. I was compelled to search, high and low, and to make a long story short, I finally found it. . . . So I won't mince words: This album has a Holy Grail-like quality for me. I say this even after many repeated listenings, fathoming the many styles it presents within its tunnel-vision.

The multi-directional styles (post-classical drone, dark trip hop/drum 'n' bass, ethnic- and experimental-electronic, Euro-free jazz, post-rock, etc.) on these blacker-than-midnight ambient recordings, combined with the compiler's cryptic liner notes, not to mention the awesome sequencing of the successive tracks, make me feel like I've been let in on some kind of chthonic secret, the results of some imaginal archeological dig, illustrated musically to marvelous effect.

And I don't think that the term "isolationism" merely illustrates a marketing ploy on Virgin Records' part (as if these recordings could ever be "big" commercially!), but rather seems a good, solid term for what is sonically going on here. That is, solo artists or duos digging down deep into the disturbing layers of the psyche, exploring ruins of dream cities, feeling dwarfed in the face of nature, numbed by the human-machine interface, hypnogogic states and confused reveries, etc.,--and this the soundtrack to it all.

In the face of so much modern music that offers itself exclusively to the masses, it is refreshing that this music addresses itself to the individual listener; a potent and very fruitful time to accompany any aloneness.

It is criminal for this album to be out-of-print for so long. But, if it comes back into print, or you can obtain a copy in some way, definitely do so. The Holy Grail of dark music is beckoning you. . . .

5 out of 5

Michael-Kim Jones (courtesy of Amazon.com website)

Incredibly cool 2-CD compilation of ambient tracks by lots of noise/ambient/industrial/etc. types like Null/Plotkin, Scorn, Ice, Total, Aphex Twin, Seefeel, O'Rang, Techno-Animal, etc., etc. There are 23 artists here with one track apiece, and the entire set clocks in at about 150 minutes, and there's very little filler... assuming, of course, that you're really hip to ambient in the first place. If you're already onto ambient, you have a pretty good idea of what the two discs sound like already; if you're not familiar with the ambient genre, then all i can say by way of description is that this is largely music about texture more than "songs," with no distracting lyrics, and sounds made largely of unrecognizable samples. I will say this: if you like even a tiny handful of the bands listed here, you should devote massive amounts of energy to tracking this down and making it YOURS, for all of these tracks are strong ones and otherwise unreleased (some are merely remixes of previously released stuff, though). It's also an excellent introduction to ambient in general, for those who haven't checked out the genre before. The only bad thing is that finding it may be difficult; it's imported from Holland and kind of obscure (of course; I like it, so it MUST be obscure, right?), not to mention hard to find. But it will be well worth the effort for those who do decide to seek it out.

Other artists on the compilation are Jim O'Rourke (Illusion of Safety), Paul Schutze, Zoviet France, Labradford, Disco Inferno, Nijiumu (Fushitsusa), Total (Skullflower spinoff), AMM, O'Rang, Final, Lull, and Thomas Koren. Many of these are splinter groups (for instance, Ice is an offshoot of God with Justin Broadrick on board, Techno-Animal is another variant of the same lineup, Final is Broadrick's solo ambient project, Lull is an offshoot of Scorn, which in turn is an offshoot of Napalm Death, Main is led by ex-Loop/Godflesh guitarist Robert Hampton, and so on) that might well be of interest to those who follow the original groups in question... just another reason to check it out and be entranced by those hypnotic, seductive background sounds. Of course, you need a scorecard and many, many pencils to keep TRACK of all these guys and which project they're doing what with at any given moment, but hey, who said life was supposed to be simple?

from Dead Angel, Issue #2