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ENCOMIAST: Winter's End Releasy year: 2001 Format: CD Tracklist: 1: Io 07:40 Total Length: 65:51 General Facts: Review: This project is a brand new one to me despite its background on MP3.com. What strikes me first when listening to Winter's End is that it isn't strange at all that this project has got to release a CD. The music is very professional and Encomiast surely have a lot of nice inovative ideas added to their music. It is mainly serene Dark Ambient which is presented here, ranging from warm to cold in atmosphere. It is mainly composed of acoustic drones but at some places, the music suddenly get more melodic as melancholic and gloomy melodies emerge in the music. It is nice to hear how Encomiast have managed to combine melodic music with Dark ambient, the result is that this album hardly ever gets boring or monotonous.The use of female vocals in the music is also a nice element, it doesn't sound like traditional female vocals but they are certainly original in a way I find hard to describe. Some harsher tracks are also confined but it never really gets unsettling, instead the music just flows on like ether, very relaxing and soothing. While the opening tracks is a quite warm Dark Ambient track, Embrace:Betrayal creates a very cold atmosphere akin to that of the one an only Aghast album. The music is very haunting and eerie and composed of beautiful drones that sends out shivers into the listening environment. It is a really gloomy track and also an excellent example on how to create a very rich Dark Ambient track with a small ensemble of instruments. Apparentely the third track has been a very succesful one for Encomiast. It's good though I personally prefer the more haunting sides of Encomiast; the splendid Embrace:Betrayal mentioned above, the frosty title-track or the melancholic If i dream i have you. The latter mentioned is truly a track to be appreciated in the evening in a dark room, at night before one goes to sleep. Well, what more can I say really? I have nothing really bad to say about this project. It was a positive surprise for me and I look forward to hearing of Encomiast in the future. They certainly have much to offer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Five questions to Encomiast ECTONAUT: Please introduce your project to the Ortus Obscurum readers. For how long have you been doing this and for what reason? ROSS HAGEN: Encomiast is now in its 5th year of existence and I guess we do this because we feel compelled to for some reason. Well, I feel that way at any rate. I remember starting out I had romantic notions of somehow representing emotion in a pure form independent of musical language, but I don't think that way anymore. ECTONAUT: Tell us something about the tracks on the reviewed release. Did you work with specific methods when you composed them? Is there a concept behind this release or anything else interesting that you think we should know about this release? ROSS HAGEN: One possibly interesting thing about this release is that Nick was (and still is) at Cambridge in the UK while I was working on this in Davidson. He'd drop in for a day or two and we'd try to get some material put down and then he'd be off and I'd put the pieces together later. Other times he'd just mail DATs or MDs to me with things he was working on. It's a pretty productive system, actually, since the independent work produces something that we wouldn't arrive at any other way (although I suppose that could be said about any process). ECTONAUT: How would you describe your music completely new listeners? Do you feel that your project belongs to a certain genre? Are there any bands that you think you can relate to soundwise and conceptwise? ROSS HAGEN: I suppose I'd describe Encomiast as falling somewhere inbetween the harsher isolationist vein of dark ambient and the more melodic and psychedelic type, mostly because these are the two styles that Nick and I bring to the table. It was hard but I think we struck a balance between the two, although individual pieces tend to fall slightly to either side. I remember at first I was thinking of this project in the same terms as some of the Scandinavian artists like Raison d'Etre and Hazard, but I'm not exactly sure where to put it now, partly because I haven't kept up with the new sounds as well as I should! ECTONAUT: What is most important in music according to you? How do you define quality music and what are your musical influences? ROSS HAGEN: The most important thing for me in music is that an artist create his or her own space in which to work. I don't necessarily think that this is a conscious process, but that it comes about from absorbing ideas and re-reading them in a unique manner. I also tend to like music that shows thought and logic behind it, even if it's kind of intangible. I guess I'd define quality music as music that seems to posses an essential quality, to be completely vague about it. I don't really care if it's commercially oriented or not. I'm not sure how to define this, since words like "emotion" and "authentic" don't quite cut it, but hopefully you get the idea. There's a German word for it but it escapes me. I guess my musical influences for this project would have to include folks like Philip Glass and some of the European modernists like Webern and Berg. Hah, reading that sounds funny but I guess we're sort of two-faced that way. ECTONAUT: What plans do you have for the future? Are there any new releases planned? Anything else you would like to add? ROSS HAGEN: Our future plans right now are centered around a December release of our new CD Espera on H/s Recordings out of the UK. The first 50 copies are also going to include a disc of live recordings and other ephemera. We're also planning some more live shows as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - Click here to enter the Encomiast homepage - Click here to contact Encomiast |
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