Hoor-paar-Kraat - Mercurial Little Jitterbug Mp3

Review by aQuarius recOrds

While in some ways, Mercurial Little Jitterbug has much in common with its predecessor Asha Dasha, it is in many ways a whole new creature. It's still ambient, still dark and mysterious, spare and spacious. But on MLJ, the sound is much more rooted in found sound and field recordings. Voices, conversations, children laughing and playing, traffic, wind, footsteps, the clatter and clunk of shifting objects, people working, in fact the first track is as far as we can tell a straight field recording. Which is in no way to say it's not fascinating and lovely to listen to, it is. It's just not at all what we expected. which is usually a good thing.
The second track is also based around field recordings, the honking of horns off in the distance, children's voices, bird songs, all heavily reverbed and dramatically panned, so a stick run a along a steel fence will trill from one ear to the other. But track two is also where Hoor-Paar-Kraat begins to shape and craft the sounds into dark ambient soundscapes. Adding thick swaths of low end rumble, deftly and subtly using effects to turn the sound of the city and the sounds of nature into an otherworldly dreamlike music. The next track is a barely there ambient whir, punctuated by the sound of dripping water, and some sort of distant bell or chime. Very abstract, but quite beautiful. The ten minute long fourth track is the most active, with the sound of bells and chimes and pipes, metal on metal, doused in reverb and allowed to hover in wide open expanses of room sound, only to occasionally be overtaken by huge throbs of low end and little squalls of kitchen sink clatter. Again so simple, but so strangely haunting and hypnotic. The final track is another muted clattery soundscape, although in this instance, part way through, the sounds bleed and blur, smearing into a washed out whirl of droning sound, metallic reverberations, struck metal, all stretched and blurred into a slow shifting, glacial shimmer, probably the most overtly 'musical' track on the disc. So lovely. In fact, this entire disc is just so completely and utterly captivating. Some of the most affecting, deep listening drone music we've ever heard!