I literally slept on ambient music for years. Even as I explored various permutations of electronic music, I preferred songs that came with a percussive beat. While I never danced in clubs, I liked going to hear producers and DJs perform live if their music delivered heavy rhythms that hit me in my head and by guts. The airier, free-form artists made no sense to me as their work didn’t connect anything in my musical background.
That is until I started digging deeper into modal and free jazz in conjunction with Burial’s work after Untrue. Such pursuits helped to untether my brain from needing a strong rhythmic anchor in music. After years of thunderous rock and keening emo, I eventually trained my brain to listen to quieter music. I found that I could better parse melodies, counterpoint, and other compositional ideas the further I stepped away from the structures of western pop music.
Which is exactly what excited me with Vicious Kisses by Marcel Sletten.
A split release by Sound as Language and Primordial Void, this eight-song abum is a quintessential example of contemporary ambient music. He creates dense sound collages of overlapping synths and the sparsest of beats with a patient curiosity. Tracks range from tense, jittery, and insular in tone, but without any creeping paranoia that would make the music reductive. Thick slabs of synth drone ooze throughout the mix creating this languid pacing that’s somehow both anxious and slippery.
Sletten channels Hyperdub through the lens of 4AD. It’s Cocteau Twins and Kode 9 hanging out with Holly Herndon and JD Emanuel. Billowing clouds build on the horizon, pulsing with grays, blues, and purples. Swirls of sound coalesce like an oncoming storm, as the energy of the album slowly gains intensity. It’s as if you can hear him experimenting with sounds in real time. “What does this do? Can I even do this? What happens now? What should happen here?”
“Orange Tilth” rings with asynchronous yet angelic pulse chords that create the sense of floating through lush piles of cumulonimbus. On “Kali Yuga,” the merest hit of hi-hat and bass root notes ground the listener as warbling synths and odd snare claps threaten to unmoor your ears. The highlight of the experience, “Sleepless Nights” combines a syncopated metronome with a two-chord phrase while ethereal swathes of sound speak in whale-song. Closing out the album, “Aquarius Sun” peels back the clouds with keening synths that stretch into and beyond the horizon.
Nothing is ever straightforward with this music, and it’s intoxicating.
Marcel Sletten provides Vicious Kisses with a recognizable through line of boozy and bruised nighttime grooves. The edges shimmer with warmth and lightness that actively resist any sort of cumbersome heft. Think of it as shoegaze and folk masking as electro right down to the dreamy fuzz and sumptuous textures. It’s the perfect music for 3am – you can’t sleep, but you need sleep, and you’re fighting sleep even though it will be hours before you sleep.
Header image courtesy of Tom Bubul.