a day by the sea

elsewhere review

Moss Covered Technology – Seafields

(Dronarivm)

The landscape of current experimental ambient music can feel a little overwhelming at times with many new labels popping up, some ambient producers releasing what sometimes feels like an album a month and pandemic-locked-down artists issuing their reflective ambient oeuvre for lack of touring their otherwise unrelated material. While there’s a lot of fantastic music around, often a lot of it feels like just more of the same and/or a little uninspired. But sometimes a new release sticks out from the crowd by sheer conviction and passion for the genre and a well executed concept with music that touches the heart and spirit of the listener.

Greig Baird’s fifth album proper as Moss Covered Technology took well over a year to emerge and it wasn’t an easy task to follow 2019’s excellent Slow Walking LP (issued on Canada’s Polar Seas Recordings). Now Moss Covered Technology’s Seafields delivers on many levels. The new album was released by Russia’s Dronarivm (on CD it is beautifully packaged in a carton drawer sleeve with photography by Baird himself). Baird’s submerged melodies and glitches, interspersed with further micro melodies and humming basses that are dancing with themselves, create an intricate microcosm that feels warm and weightless, with every howsoever small sound detail in just the right place.

Most of us know the powerful feelings of experiencing the seaside, where the vast ocean rumbles, the wind blows and the forces of nature appear condensed and raw. It can make the challenges of modern day living seem tiny and trivial in comparison. On Seafields Baird reflects on his strong ties to the UK seaside and how walking the coastline can put things into perspective. Listening to the slowly developing sound sculptures on Seafields, it’s easy to imagine being transported to that place and becoming lost in an imaginary scene. There’s a clever mix of real and artificial sounding elements that don’t quite sound like, but make you feel as if, you are below water or on a windswept lonely beach. Calm sets in as you become smaller under washes of sound. At times you feel you can hear the hustle and bustle on a far away pier from where people’s voices and traditional music echoes through the wind, but by now you are probably adding your own imaginary sounds to the melange, as if you were dreaming.

It’s the gentle approach and honest sentiment in Baird’s music that makes it so easily, universally felt, we all seek this place where we can forget about or reflect on our troubles for a little while and come home refreshed with some new energy that nature provides. Seafields succeeds in translating a truly regenerating actual experience into music with soul and purpose that can reach open minds, like a day by the sea.

(Jenus)