Brock Van Wey
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If you see dear Brock on the street, turn your back: the friend is what most resembles the stereotype of a bad guy, complete with face tattoos, pronounced eyebrow arches, and an empty gaze like a plastic bowl, a real thug. But then he is a melancholic cat-loving DJ, that's how life is. Van Wey's artistic journey is also like this, (apparently) oxymoronic: in the past 10 years, he has released more than 30 albums, most of them under the pseudonym bvdub, (a frequency that I believe would even invoke admiration from the great incontinent ones, like Zappa or Muslimgauze), a number so high that it really makes the primary prejudice in these cases immediate, namely “but isn't it the case that at least half of these albums are not so essential, perhaps the bad guy doesn't even manage to create a coherent, valid, and original product, except in spurts?”; let’s add the fact that bvdub means ambient, at most very airy and expansive dub techno, and it's known that there are indeed suspiciously prolific projects in the genre. I do not claim that all of Brock's albums are good, in fact, most are avoidable; however, his works can be divided into two groups, the standard albums and the topical albums, where the American's music embraces new elements and are always better, more heartfelt than the others, besides being beautiful from beginning to end. It really is so: either all the tracks on one of his albums are useless, or they all seem to spring forth from the same emotional state.

This is definitely one of the albums he nailed. Starting in 2010, bvdub's arctic albums began to come out, and this is perhaps the best of them, together with the first of the “series,” The Art of Dying Alone (the title speaks for itself). If you put on a bvdub album, you get serious, to understand it just the start of the first track is enough: a slow pull towards the clear sky of a frozen land will start, a few notes slowly climbing over each other to transport us so high as to erase any vertigo. The beauty of bvdub's ambient is that behind the wall of sounds, if you listen carefully, it's possible to perceive a vibration, a friendly beat, a spirit from his past as a DJ, let's say a masked beat that sets the piece in motion avoiding the static cloud effect that so much ambient gives: the speed is just right for a great glide spanning distances characterized by different colors. This album is varied, in fact, unlike Brock's standard album: guitar samples, gentle string touches, effects play, pauses, hypnotic synth “solos,” piano flights - the length of the album exploits the variety of the song sections. It's very beautiful to arrive after minutes and minutes of ascent on pad to a pristine peak where a few solitary notes slowly trace a melody which, if accelerated, could be the fortune of some single, and instead here is stretched by the immense melancholic atmosphere that permeates the album to evoke feelings of isolation and contemplation, truly unavoidable during listening. You can't have company here.

Hey, a second. A kind of beat, melodies... it's clear what bvdub is doing. He uses the instruments of house, techno, let's say of E/IDM too, in short, of electronic genres that are not ambient to make ambient. That's why it sounds so different from the usually very calm albums you typically hear. But it's the vocal samples that make the album take the next step up. The best course is a group of inspired vocal inserts that personalize the ambient, giving it a more human consistency. Phrases that would be pop become hermetic prophecies in a half-forgotten language. The voices, especially female ones, are adorned with angelic connotations (read: a lot of echo and reverb) to descend from above onto our tonsured and very devout heads as we walk the mule track to some icy hermitage. It’s really like an epiphany to be heard with closed eyes lying on the bed or lost in a semi-sleep, just reach beyond the middle of Can't Go Home Without You, for instance, for a deep thrill. Beautiful music to listen to, aesthetically pleasing, boundlessly cold but never inhospitable; instead, it's like watching the snow fall beyond the glass and further ahead a white abyss, but you are well-wrapped in a thick blanket warming the last person remaining on the face of the earth. Without responsibilities or hopes, in a stasis, perfectly balanced between peace and despair.