The Burial comparison comes built into Sven Weisemann’s Desolate project. Weissmann’s foray into ambient garage resulted in last year’s excellent The Invisible Insurrection, which was both shameless and tasteful in marrying the UK bass auteur’s permeable atmosphere of soggy isolation, halting 2-step, and cut-and-paste, vocal-driven sound designs with Weisemann’s subtler more ambient and techno minded aesthetic, more eclectic and purposeful instrumentation, and, arguably, more complex arrangements. The comparisons were as specific as their shared love of bullet shells clattering to the floor and snippets of ambiguous film dialog wafting, half-remembered through the stereo field, yet Desolate never lacked for an identity. The Invisible Insurrection still had more in common with Weisemann’s own Xine than Untrue.
While Celestial Light Beings continues with a similar tonal hue as The Invisible Insurrection, it recedes further into Weisemann’s own sensibilities, sharpening its creeky instrumental impulses and back-alley sample pallet while most signs of found-sound 2-step and rubbery dubstep synths have been pushed out of the foreground. It’s arranged less like a dubby bass record, letting its textures breathe and flourish instead of cutting them into propulsive slabs to simply echo inward. Celestial can often feel like a weightless Shackleton with its focus on flickering, candle-lit world music samples and it draws further on Weisemann’s experience as a pianist and his brushes with modern classical, often pulling the record into the realm of ambient piano-and-strings guys like Murcof and Jacaszek. Elements present on The Invisible Insurrection have simply been massaged and milked into more immediate fixtures on Celestial Light Beings, yet, despite a half-retreat from garage back into something closer to downtempo, the results still feel like an incremental step from one record to the next. Those discarded bullet casings and cinematic flourishes still get good deal of face time.
There’s a lot to be said regarding the intricate textural brushstrokes found on any given track of Celestial Light Beings, but the record’s appeal is still in its inherent introverted, grandiose beauty. The dripping, liquidated stretches of piano reverberation coupled with the bodiless, black-Crayola strings give the record a constant atmosphere of brimming and ebbing emotion without getting brash or upper-atmosphere about it. The tracks retain a specific downbeat loneliness that isn’t necessarily unfamiliar, but on a track like “Desolate” with its single echoing snare clunk smacking wearily between solitary piano notes fit for a drizzled stroll through deserted, low-key cobblestone streets, it’s hard not to feel like Weisemann is treading something personal and real here.
Opener “Ambrosa” is more indicative of the LP’s majority, opening with some filmic mutters about vampires and sociopaths before coalescing with dribbling noirish piano, shuttering, debris-rattling percussion, ghostly Mid Eastern-tinged samples, and a whispered falsetto vocal. Elsewhere, “Synaesthetic” settles around a hesitant 4/4 and dreary vocal wail, its percussion raining down in vertical, tin-roof patters while little vocal and brass exultations crop up. Saved for last is “Exclusion of Light,” which seems to finally fully give in to its reeling string melodies while a whispered drum ‘n’ bass loop barely registers like another track playing in the next room, only its sub-octaves registering. Deolate hasn’t completely disconnected from bass music’s mutations, but on Celestial Light Being they appear in faint whispers rather than in driving overtones, instead shrouded by Weisemann’s more assured and identifiable grasp.
