Celer - Enagaged touches

Celer, "Engaged touches" (out on new label Home Normal in March 2009)

New blissful ambient/Neo-classical stuff, which sounds a lot like William Basinski, Manual and Stars of the Lid. Mindblowingly beautiful, if you ask me.

Listen to some of it here:

http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=169895

And here:

http://www.homenormal.com/releases/celer-engaged-touches

Or other music by Celer here:

http://www.myspace.com/celersite

The official release description goes like this:

The music of Will Thomas Long's and Danielle Baquet-Long's Celer is an absorbing combination of classic ambient, minimalism, and – perhaps as the most distinct characteristic – overwhelming romanticism. Longing, melancholy, nostalgia, and the like seem to be recurring themes in Will and Dani's works.

Engaged Touches begins with hypnotic sounds of a train clattering on its tracks. This departure seems to set the whole piece into a context of travel and distance, moving away from and towards something, someone. After a while these sounds give way to a rousing, majestic set of string loops. Similar phases of different field recordings and grandiose loops take turns throughout the whole work. This brings about a dynamics of contrasts: the concrete and the abstract, the particular and the general, the mundane and the exalted, and so on. The phases of string loops take up most of the album and evoke a yearning feeling of distance, grand and epic. The title, Engaged Touches, however, refers to quite the opposite, the close and intimate. It feels as if it is these kinds of touches that the string loops wailingly, albeit very gracefully, long for.

This is exactly the kind of powerful romanticism that seems to define so much of Celer's work. Engaged Touches is another beautiful addition to the rapidly growing body of work by Celer – an oeuvre that I already consider one of the most important in modern ambient music. (Antti Rannisto)

Yes I'm really liking this a lot.

Nice stuff.

Celer are the bomb. I'm not really a big ambient fan but I could sit through one of their releases anyday. That, and the Home Normal label in general should turn out pretty ace as it's being run by Ian Hagwood/Koen Park...check it out for sure.