Dark Music Review – Miles to Midnight
Review Written By Casey Douglass
Miles to Midnight is a Dark Jazz Ambient album with a Lynchian Noir feel: A hotel trapped between two worlds and a detective with a traumatized past. God Body Disconnect's live jazz drums and cinematic wall-of-sound builds the foundation of the mysterious hotel. Cities Last Broadcast brings ghostly tape loops and melodies stuck in time. Atrium Carceri dusts off his old pianos and shatters reality with low bass rumbles and brings you into the other side of the hotel. For lovers of smokey soundtracks to unwritten movies.
The
first line of the description above does an excellent job of summing
up Miles to Midnight’s tone and aesthetic. I’m not a big
fan of jazz, but I do like me some weird. Miles to Midnight is
an album that creates images of long, art-deco styled corridors, with
green lampshades and brass figurines holding them. It almost causes
you to taste the dust in the ruby red carpet that has lost its
lustre, and it brings about an unnerving feeling that the shadows in
the corners of the room are, somehow, a little darker than they have
any right to be.
The
jazz drum element is a tremendous fit for the dark imagery the
soundscapes create, its relaxed rhythm and brushed beats nestling
very comfortably amongst the more eerie vocal effects and bassy
rumbles. A Thousand Empty Rooms is a prime example of this. After a
delicate start of a few plucked notes hanging in the soundscape, a
slow beat begins, joined by piano notes that seem to fill out the
high spaces in the composition. When they tinkle into the rafters, a
birdsong like flurry joins them, creating a quirky space that seems
to have a life of its own. For me, this track brought to mind the
image of an extravagant chandelier hanging in an empty room, a sole
candle flickering nearby, its flame reflecting in the chandelier’s
myriad crystals. Relaxing and a little melancholy.
A
few of the tracks are like this, but others are more threatening or
strange. The Other Lobby is a prime example of this. It begins with
the sound of voices and some kind of bustling activity. There are
dings, and the impression of muzak, before undulating electro-bee
vocals and a strange alarm like sound create a further feeling of
whimsy. The track brought to mind someone watching an old episode of
The Outer Limits on a black and white bunny-ear bearing TV, the
soundtrack of the show crackling its way into the room just behind
the lightness and darkness of the images on the screen. Or, looked at
another way, it felt like finding the Museum of Curiosities at the
fun fair when you were just looking for the toilet.
Yet
other tracks are more threatening, such as Sorry Sir, You Are In The
Wrong Room. A deep, bassy space full of rumbling, crackling, darting
notes and muted piano. It creates a hanging atmosphere of menace. If
The Other Lobby was mistakenly finding your way into the Museum of
Curiosities, this track was more like stumbling into a room
containing shadowy people planning their next crime.
Miles
to Midnight is an incredible slice of dark music, its rhythms and
soundscapes lulling and threatening, heavy and yet sometimes light at
the same time. I know from the description that it is based on a
strange noir hotel, but I also got the impression that it could be an
excellent depiction of an insomniac getting through the night. The
isolated and spectral locations just seemed to create that general
feeling of being alone, which could be transposed into any number of
settings. If any of what I’ve said intrigues you, check out Miles
to Midnight via the stuff below, and if you do buy it, pop it on just
as the last light of the sun vanishes over the horizon one evening.
Visit the Miles toMidnight page on Bandcamp here for more information, and be
sure to check out A Thousand Empty Rooms below:
I was given a free
copy of this album to review.
Album Title:
Miles to Midnight
Artists: Atrium
Carceri, Cities Last Broadcast, God Body Disconnect
Label: Cryo
Chamber
Released:
Jan 09, 2018
