Circular – Moon Pool

English / Polish version

Circular - Moon Pool
    ULTIMAE RECORDS
    Circular
    Moon Pool
    2014

      1. Lunokhod
      2. Selenic Light
      3. Theory of Tides
      4. Ashlands
      5. 3 Moons
      6. Imbrium (featuring AES Dana)
      7. Synchronous
      8. Meteorites

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The insane fjords, evil trolls, crystal clear air, Bryggen, Lofoten, reindeer, Scandinavian simplicity – so far these are just the associations which I have, while thinking about Norway, which I had the opportunity to visit several times (thank you, my dearest sister!), but today I can join to this group a project named Circular, which is a duo Bjarte Andreassen and Jostein Dahl Gjelsvik, creating an ambient space under the aegis of the French label Ultimae. Even before heading to the festival holiday journeys, I had the pleasure to listen to their album from the year 2014, with a title MOON POOL, but I can truly enjoy it and be in this ambient mood just right now, when over my native village a truly autumnal aura prevailed. Right now, when the cold tends to covering up with a blanket, drinking a cup of tea with some raspberry syrup, when rain drops stream down the window glass, and the memories come back and the melancholy prevails, it is the best time to focus all our attention on eight tracks, which have been created by the Norwegian duo.

MOON POOL is just bursting with the Norwegian climate, and I do not mean only the photos from the booklet accompanying the album, really not the same photographs (of some rocks, water, sea) bring out the Norwegian nature. Listening to the tracks from LUNOKHOD to the final METEORITES, I can feel the aura directly from somewhat mystical Norway, but for me something else seems to be the most valuable in the proposals of Circular. I mean the fact that their 'arctic ambient’ (though I really like this term, for me it perfectly captures their sound) allows to extremely focus the thoughts, flowing somewhere in the labyrinths of the mind, which are restless, chaotic. MOON POOL relaxed me to a point, where I can feel the inner peace – a state, for which it was difficult for me during the past few months. This is the power of the music impact, the ambient force, which I did not appreciate earlier, and I openly admit – I did not understand it. After some time, I have discovered two things – it sounds trivial, but firstly, you need to mature into ambient, because it is easy to get carried away when the voltage rises in a downtempo track, it is known that immediately comes the cleansing, long-awaited climax, it is easy to get caught up in a trance dance with a crowd of friendly people, who have a great energy thanks to some tracks of uptempo music. Secondly, you have to listen to the ambient music intently, it cannot be a background for some conversations, events, so it fits brilliantly as the music to the photos, images, videos, in which there is no place for any kind of unnecessary talking. As usual, in the case of Ultimae I urge you to watch the tracks’ teasers on youtube – the music of Ultimae always in 100 percent reflects what we can see in the pictures and vice versa.

I do not like drum’n’bass, so in my summary of MOON POOL I have to reveal that the sound of the track IMBRIUM (created by the duo Circular together with Aes Dana) does not quite convince me, in which we can clearly hear the elements of this music genre. The same track, like the other ones has much to offer, serves a whole range of emotions and soothes our nerves. In my opinion, the Norwegian duo has showed that they can chalk out some interesting musical landscapes, in which we can feel not only their Norwegian roots, but above all the reliable, Ultimae climate.
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7 / 10
Kasia