Monday morning dread: Tom Holden and CEO Dreams #ambient #idm #electronic
It’s that time. The first Monday in September. New terms and back to work. Deserves a gentle start with musical accompaniment from Tom Holden and CEO Dreams. The mood is tentative and the style ambient glitch.
Tome Holden from the UK offers Plutopian Breakfast Vol 1. It’s the first single from a forthcoming release and is a delightfully experimental track. But not with experimental meaning difficult. Experimental meaning adding to some spacey electronics some delightful almost flamenco guitar work. It is a bit Pink Floyd / psychedelic in places but you’d have to be really churlish to object to the chill it generates. Six minutes of ambient wonderousness. Sit back, relax and go with the spaced out flow.
CEO Dreams is also from the UK. On Credits we have a slightly glitchy, IDM restless ambient track. The track is the final on on the Played out on Rooftops EP. CEO Dreams says that the EP was, “inspired by HK cinema, with the name coming from this excerpt (taken from Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs – The Trilogy): “Rooftops are the haunts of those who have no place in the buildings or the streets below. Aside from the occasional workman, they provide a space for the criminal, the deviant, and the vagrant. In addition, rooftops represent spaces forbidden to the uninitiated and off-limits to the general population. They are taboo, and, perhaps because of this, take on libidinal significance. The rooftop provides a quintessential male perch on top of phallic protuberances, and it seems fitting moments of doubt surrounding identity and male authority should be played out on the roofs of Hong Kong.””
Credits holds within a tension between chilled and glitched sounds. It has an expanse of sound but always brought back to the small things within our reach. In the small things we see the reality of the larger picture. Space is only possible when we hear it interrupted and its boundaries. That’s what this track skillfully does. Makes us appreciate space and notice its urban interruption.
ACID TED 