Mauve (studio album)
by Balm

From ForegroundNoise 09/17/2020 10:10

Mauve, the debut album from Amsterdam-based ambient duo Balm, is an exercise in restraint. Every moving part faultlessly enacts its own appointed function; you’d be tempted to compare its operation to finely-tuned cogs in a well-oiled machine, though the rattle and whurrs of metal on metal have been swapped out for a soft textural palette that permeates the release. The resultant feeling is less industrial, more pastoral.

Writing over email, Luke Elliott (one half of Balm) cites the sonic ventures of H. Takahashi and Suzanne Kraft as their primary influences, alongside frequent Kraft collaborator Jonny Nash. But while these artists are all modern contemporaries, a straight line can be drawn to their work from the consciously environmental and new age music of the late 70s and 80s. Light in the Attic Records put together Kankyō Ongaku last year, an excellent compilation of Japanese ambient from 1980-1990, and it wouldn’t be hard to imagine the breezy guitar strums of “Time Is Away” nestled in between Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, and Yasuaki Shimizu.

Having moved from Leeds to Amsterdam for work, Elliott first met Lisbon-native Luis Martins as volunteers helping to revert overgrown farmland to wetland reserve, and perhaps it’s the project’s ecological origins that has informed its underlying affinity with nature. Even as Elliott describes the two spent years he and Martins spent molding Balm’s sound, his language can’t help but circle back to semantics borrowed from the natural world. Their artistic process is described as happening “naturally”; Mauve is defined as an exploration of something “organic”.

Each of its seven tracks were constructed from live recording sessions revisited and reworked in minute detail, and as we wade our way through lush soundscapes teeming with vibrant energy, nothing that crops up feels accidental or out of place. Following the short introduction of “Linear Minor”, the delicate interplay between the high notes and comforting bass hum in “The Palace” resembles a great ecosystem locked in cosmic dance. We’re returned to this dynamism with the album’s closer “Low-Pressure Front”, in which despite the focus of attention constantly being shifted, its momentum is never lost.

But restraint can also be a double edged sword. While moments of excess during the album’s brief 22-minute runtime are few and far between, in remaining firmly fixed to the rails Mauve does run the risk of monotony. Despite being the longest track at nearly five minutes, centrepiece “Idle Patterns” never quite manages to shake its inertia, a stasis felt all the more keenly when juxtaposed with the much livelier (and shorter) “Flecks”. Nevertheless, faulting a debut for a lack of ambition speaks volumes about the potential of those behind it. Working out the chinks is what the next album is for. Onward now, to pastures new.