I'm glad to introduce to our readers a debut full length album of a German band False Mirror - Chronostatic scenes, which gave a start to a successfull (I hope) career in post-industrial underground. Previously Tobias Hornberger (who stands after False Mirror) with his project took part in various compilations issued by Tosom, Legoego, Aerotone and other labels and his first full-length masterpiese was released by Data Obscura, a label, specialising mostly in ambient music and a bit in industrial/noise and minimal techno. Apart from Tobias Hornberger, responsible for synthesizers, samplers, algorithms, field recordings, flutes(!) and overtone singing, the following people were involved in the process of creation: Sylvia Riester, who painted the album cover and Dieter Trüstedt performing shakuhachi flute.
Chronostatic Scenes consists of 8 tracks, which are really dificult to divide, difficult to part them within the album. Simply because one is a continuation of another, they don't have the beginning as well as the end, the sound just flows through all the 63 minutes without any intention to stop. It can be compared to looking at a series of paintings, situated one close to another, or a panorama with many subjects united, having one theme. "This album evolved from images and moods of my dreams", as the small booklet says. And the sound is indeed close to that: I could hear so many things - waterfalls in a midnight garden with tall trees speaking language of creaks, slow motion of ice under everwinter dark blue skies illuminated by aurora borealis, vast fields with tall waving grass whispering a bedtime story to a lonely lost traveller who doesn't know he's not going to ever wake up. This album draws a thin borderline between 'calm' and 'anxious'. From one point the sound is slow, kind of calming, with a slight touch of magic gives an idea of staying in a magic forest filled with tiny glowing creatures and you experience this feeling of being in front of the gates to some majestic mystery. And on the other side there appears to be something morbid in the music, soundscapes that make you feel anxious, make you get a premonitory feeling that it all is not going to have a happy ending eventually. Small noisy sounds, distant backgrounds make you feel a bit out of it, as if something was tracking you from the very first moment you entered the world of dreams.
The album is not really abstract, it is not built mainly on noises. There're many melody lines out there - sometimes harmonious and relaxing, sometimes a bit disharmonic and raising uneasy feelings. From this point, from the point of sound, it reminded me Caul's - The Sound of Faith. Different samples - like falling water or creaks - make this album more alive. It doesn't sound technoid, mechanised, artificial, rather quite natural and very spacy. I'd like to mark out those rustling sounds that appear here and there in track called Beyond The White Plainscapes: listening to this album at night they made me turn my head not once and check all the corners of the room in search of something strange and suspicious.
Generally, I liked the way soundscapes change each other, one gradually turning into another without interruptions. I managed to give a listen to another full length album of False Mirror first - North and will certainly be waiting for a new album and will be following the continuation of False Mirror's history.