Among my favourite drone groups is Haarvöl, a trio of two musicians (José Pereira and João Faria) and Rui Manuel Vieira, who handles the visual side. I don’t know what that looks like, as I never saw them in concert (or looked on YouTube). Their latest album is inspired by a book by Hakim Bey from the late 1990s, “about the then-emerging possibility of the virtual. With the lucidity for which he is known, he recognised at the time that the virtual was nothing more than a new avenue for expanding capitalism. He introduced the concept of temporary autonomous zones as a kind of Foucauldian heterotopia — spaces that existed only for as long as they could evade capture.” Of course, things got way more radical than that; just look around you. The music here is the opposite of more of everything; it is less of everything. Six lengthy pieces, each about ten minutes of slow music, heavy on the ambience, drones and atmospherics. I hope I am not as attached to screens, buttons, and more of everything (except for reading books on my iPad), and I like slow and quiet music more than loud music, and Haarvöl tick all those boxes. It’s not to say each of these six pieces is just a few tones sustaining on end. Far from! Each piece is a multi-layered event of sustaining tones, but with shorter samples, voices, bell sounds and more melodic stuff, which makes this a delightful trip. I think I called their previous release ‘The Uncanny Organisation Of Timeless Time’ their best work to date, but I’d like to add ‘Horizons Of Suspended Zones’ as a contender. It is a highly varied disc of some abstract ambient, meeting more melodic touches. Excellent! (FdW)
via Vital Weekly