Brendon Anderegg
June

Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp (Mountains) have written some of the most beautiful pages of electronic and electro-acoustic minimal ambient music in recent years. It's hard to rank them because practically every release of theirs is worth the so-called price of admission, but ultimately, the trio released on Thrill Jockey between the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one ("Choral," "Air Museum," "Centralia") has shown us a pair of experimenters as skilled in the search for new sounds as they are in the ability to outline suggestive soundscapes of great echo-emotional impact.

Having dedicated himself full-time to the Mountains project, Brendon Anderegg (also the founder and owner alongside Holtkamp of the artistic collective Apestaartje, which is oriented towards a blend of sounds and visual arts using both traditional and cutting-edge technologies and now based in Brooklyn, NY) had not released a solo work for practically 13 years, so this new album titled "June" arrives somewhat unexpectedly, but at the same time, just listening to it makes one realize that it is not a secondary release or the result of improvisations.

Composed of a single long track, "June" is a very long 37-minute ambient session, but divided into several ideal acts and built upon a series of background sound vibrations that seem to almost bounce off a surface made of synthetic components that do not exist on this planet, a kind of flexible water, while alien pulses send signals with what can be considered a universal Morse code; more emotional moments unfold in forms of autogenous minimalism, as if a kind of thought stream lets the sounds slide down a steep surface, and they fall, fall, fall slowly like a marble in slow-motion, and then the sound majestically explodes until it rises into a radioactive storm that heralds that encounter, that ideal handshake between two beings belonging to two different species, coming from planets separated by light-years who speak different languages and maybe have grown up and lived their entire lives next to each other without ever meeting until this simply happened, and in the end, the most widespread form of communication, the most common, even mundane, becomes that great step for man and that leap for humanity, just in time to be a rebirth at the end of spring. An ideal new genesis for all humanity.

Sincerely beautiful, very strong in terms of emotional content, and with a fantastic sound quality without any pretense of becoming something iconic or marking the course of music history, "June" could appeal to those who love minimalist and conceptual ambient music, those who appreciate sound landscaping, a certain idealistic new age, and works by musicians like Michael Sterns, J.D. Emmanuel, but also Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Cluster... Recommended.