brock van wey: white clouds drift on & on

San Francisco's Brock Van Wey (also known as bvdub) has been spreading his ambient-textured deep techno to the world for the past few years with releases on Styrax, Millions Of Moments, Southern Outpost, Meanwhile, and his very own Quietus imprint. His love of abstract shapes and forms of electronic music caught the echospace label's attention -- so much in fact, that Stephen Hitchell (Intrusion, Echospace) has made his own interpretive versions as an additional album, included along with the original. This is a soundscape of subtle beauty which paints a picture of lands yet to be explored, a sonic collage filled with heartbreak, love and happiness, all played in the same key. A pure, refined sonic collage, filled with influences that could easily be said to border the surface of works by Steve Roach, Gas, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Cage, or even the ambient works of Basic Channel, and yet, this still has an identity all its own. Beautiful layers of sound rush over you like waves in the ocean, a tidal wave of organics and textures so subtle, soft and virtually hypnotizing. There is a sense of space felt here which cannot be described in words, a sense of displacement which takes the listener out of their normal environment and away to someplace else. These spare musical fragments voyage off into the land of dreams, a place where everything appears to move in slow motion and hours feel like seconds. Simplicity in its own world is the most beautiful of things, an art of restraint -- not to do too much but to do everything at the same time, which is exactly what Brock has perfected here. This is an absolutely gorgeous gem of the highest caliber and one that the folks at echospace consider an integral part of any ambient or electronic music lover's collection.