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Vital E-Zine, Staalplaat, The Netherlands. number 386, week 35, 2003
To simply classify Loren Nerell as just an ambient composer is missing the point. I'd rather refer to Loren Nerell as a sound traveller. Either as a real traveller, armed with a microphone and tape-recorder, to Indonesia, taping sounds from traditional instruments, but also a traveller that takes you, the listener on a journey through the world. In that sense, Loren Nerell is more an ambient composer along the lines of Brian Eno or Jon Hassell and has less in common with Steve Roach or Robert Rich, for whom the pure instrument approach seems to be important. 'Taksu - an intervention from the gods, endowing a man, or perhaps a ritualobject, with divine direction. In a sense Taksu is the essence of a great performance or work of art' - it says on the cover. Can't really argue with the essense of a great performance or work of art, but this is a nice piece of music. Rainforest sounds, far away percussion (drum sounds, maybe anklung or gamelan), which are all embedded in a rich textured sound, but not that of a whole bunch of digital sounds, but it's rather, or so it seems, a treatment of those sounds by electronic means. This CD is maybe not just music, it's rather a bath: you take it, it surrounds you for a while and then you feel good. Taksu is like a hot bath, it fills the space, the environment, it's a surrounding that is nice to be in. And unlike a bath: you can put a CD on repeat and will still feel good and will never get cold. (FdW)
Backroads Music
Taksu - With 2 previous CDs, Nerell's latest takes cues from both of these albums, blending environmental sounds recorded during his Indonesian travels, and Balinese instruments together into a glowing, amorphous cloud of spine-tingling sound. The crowning touch on this project came from Steve Roach, stalwart ambient music pioneer and long-time friend of Loren's, who came in to provide the final spacial treatments and mastering of the CD. Lloyd Barnes
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Electroambient Space
Few (if any) people do environmental ambient music better than Loren Nerell. Famous for his Indonesian recordings of gamelan music, Loren delves deeper into rich ambient textures with Taksu, a nearly 70-minute journey perfect for meditation, deep listening, or whatever you like. Soft tribal drums dance lightly about as we hear drones, crickets, and other ambient sounds. It is simultaneously very quiet and yet very active, calm and yet restless, static and yet ever-changing. The drums disappear, moving us into the realms of pure floating. Voices are occasionally heard, indiscernible. Gently tinkling bells can also be heard from time to time. The collage of sounds is velvety smooth as it floats by. Unidentifiable sounds come and go, changing the character of the music, such as a slightly unsettling sound around 45:00 that adds just a touch of roughness, suggestive perhaps of someone in the distance brushing repeatedly against a piece of metal. Background voices that seemed normal, even reassuring earlier become somewhat mournful and eerie past the 47:00 mark. Eventually returning to emotionally more dispassionate ground, it carries along until some distant echoing tribal beats return along with the crickets as the music slowly luxuriously fades into nothingness. Taksu is ambience in its purest form.
I had this CD in the stereo when one of my friends came to visit, and her comment was, "Is this supposed to be relaxing? It sounds like someone died!" Well, I'm not sure really if the intention of this ambient music in particular or any ambient music in general is to be relaxing, but I found her analysis of Taksu to be interesting. Loren Nerell's musical influences range from Tangerine Dream to Balinese ritual gamelan music, so, the seriousness of the music to its maker could definitely be construed as having the gravity of acknowledging death. Loren has made a long career of studying electronic music and melding his knowledge of it with a profound curiosity and fascination with Balinese and Javan ritual and culture via sound. The results of his journeys through musical technique and cultural ritual are well- represented with the presentation of Taksu.
Taksu is a meandering piece, full of organic sounds and low moans; a hint of crickets, people talking far away, the insinuation of moisture. The album is one continuous track, lasting an hour, 9 minutes, and 17 seconds. So, this is definitely a good CD to put on and lose yourself in whatever you're doing, be it focusing on the music itself, focusing on what's inside your head when you close your eyes, painting that painting you've been putting off, or whatever it is that suits you. Because of the mixture of organic and grounded sounds, Taksu is a good album to listen to on a day when the earth is starting to feel too heavy, too industrial, too abstract and too inhuman. Taksu places one gently in the cool waters of human perception, and lets the brighter, clearer, cleaner aspects of biology and the natural environment take over. I would say the overall effect of the piece is one of cleansing. In spite of my friend's allegation that "it sounds like some- one died, " I confess I do find Taksu relaxing; invigorating, inspirational. It's a nice piece for clearing out my head, focusing on my heart, and letting the world go by. Goat
All Music Guide (my vote for reviewer has no clue review)
The most obvious point of reference for Loren Nerell's latest ambient experiment is the 1980s work of Jon Hassell, whose heavily treated trumpet, and drastically altered, found-sound collages from exotic locales defined the Fourth World genre in much the same way that Brian Eno redefined the term "ambient" in the 1970s. The problem with Nerell's single 69-minute track, though, is that while it is rich in ambience and texture, it is almost completely bereft of anything that could reasonably be called "music." You'll hear lots of distant voices singing or conversing or wailing, and you'll hear chittering insects, ceremonial bells, and other undefinable atmospheric noise, but you will hear no melodies, no obviously intentional chords, no rhythm, no apparent structure. Of course, the tacit assumption behind this album is that you, the listener, are too sophisticated to require such pedestrian stuff, or perhaps that you are going to use these sounds as a tool for meditation (the connection to Eastern mystical traditions is made explicit by the Hindu and Buddhist art on the cover and insert). If you don't listen carefully, the sonic collage moves as slowly and inexorably as a cloud, and is about as substantial; if you do listen carefully, there's all kinds of interesting stuff going on. So the question is, how hard to you want to have to listen? Rick Anderson
Diffused gamelan notes simply hover in a foglike blur; light chimes and spectral entities sometimes seem to emerge from the hushed spread of cricket-inhabited dronewavers. Just before the 14-minute mark, a deeper thrumming begins and an overall softening occurs. Low, tonal threads hover and occasionally spin off new strands against an evening-sky resonance.
More ringing/twinkling tones gradually seep into the everflowing mix; at various points, human activities (muffled speech and faraway ceremonial wails) or translucent musical essences are barely discerned within the nebulous cloud-rumbling. Eerie cries seem to twist beneath the latter moments of this simmering atmosphere, which melts into a bassy bubbling that fades into silence.
Spacious and slowly evolving, Taksu makes for an especially all-encompassing environment... Abstract ethnicities infuse Loren Nerell's darkish soundworld with exotic-yet-nearly-intangible flavors. An A- for world-building (with enhancing, mastering and processing props to Steve Roach). David J Opdyke
The liner notes suggest reading a book or meditation while listening to this album and had I bothered to acknowledge that fact the first time I listened to this it would have made a world of difference. Taksu runs right up to seventy minutes in length and while it isn't such an endurance test when it is left to play in the background, paying close attention to it through one sitting can be a bit drab. The whole of the recording is made up of a flawless combination of natural sounds, some rather ominous synthetic drones, and various vague and mysterious vocal samples (though those samples never rise above distant chatter in the mix). I say flawless because the drones and natural sounds fit together perfectly and sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the two. Certain metallic sounds and bass-heavy thumps could be either acoustic instruments recorded at a distance or studio-developed samples placed very convincingly in the mix. My biggest gripe is that nothing much ever changes over the seventy minutes and there is no way to skip through parts of the composition due to the fact that it is indexed as one track. New samples are used and the drones fluctuate between high and low tones, but they never create anything more than a consistency. The last twenty minutes or so do seem to focus on the field recordings more than the keyboards, but the atmosphere is the same. I've enjoyed this recording more and more after deciding to use it as truly ambient music. It's an excellent, slow flood of sound for studying and making food but I don't reccomend listening to it with any serious amount of attention more than once. I don't want to say a good close listen is a waste of time because a lot of the sounds are exotic and strangely alluring. Everything about Taksu is simply distant, thus it should be listened to distantly. Lucas Schleicher
Loren Nerell's association with Soleilmoon Recordings dates back to his 1996 release Lilin Dewa, as well as the more recent Indonesian Soundscapes. Taksu takes cues from both of these albums, blending environmental sounds and Balinese instruments together into a glowing, amorphous cloud of spine-tingling sound. Two musicians come to mind when listening to Taksu: Jon Hassell, who popularized Fourth World music, and Brian Eno, the father of Ambient music. While sounding nothing like the work of either artist, Loren Nerell's music takes inspiration from both of them. His music is evocative of mist-covered mountains and slow-motion waterfalls, so it owes something to Hassell. But it also pays tribute to the patient genius of Eno, with its endlessly evolving atmosphere, in which there is no beginning or end, only the present. In his liner notes for the CD booklet, Djam Karet founder Chuck Oken, Jr. describes the music as a 'sound pool' that the listener is immersed in. His words couldn't be more accurate, and it's no exaggeration to say that putting this record on is like waking up at sunrise, deep in the tropical Balinese rainforest, surrounded on all sides by the sounds of the jungle. To describe ambient or atmospheric music as 'a soundtrack' is clichéd, but it's really the best way to talk about Taksu.
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