♫♪  Ultrafog - How Those Fires Burned That Are No Longer [Preview]

Is ambience something fully felt but not experienced? Or is this flipped, is it more experiential and not emotional? Does it actually dissolve these binaries? Dissolve is a word I’d like to avoid. (There are words we use when talking about this music. What other words can be used?)

What is fully captured in it? I ask because it does seem to gesture to some kind of fullness. Does achieving an ambient thinking, or a fully ambient writing, capture what I mean? Is capturing the goal the essence? Or the essence the goal? Ambience is deceptively confusing. Ambience is not so simple.

I will keep working on these thoughts but what has welcomely prompted them is the new Ultrafog LP on Los Angeles-based label and mix series Motion Ward.

I would like to avoid giving into feelings. I would like to avoid being carried away. I would like to confront and question what is deemed unutterable. I would like to take on the fool’s errand of articulating why I am standing so firm on shaky ground.

Ultrafog is Tokyo’s Kouhei Fukuzumi, and, as the label writes, “This record, like all of Kouhei’s work, is a take on sound as a representation of memory.” Memory, that’s one of the shakiest, fully known and unknown at once. It wraps itself up in contradictions, and in wrapping, travels. This music does travel, but perhaps not in a wandering or meandering way. It skirts itself through an environment that is a total image, if I let myself see it and not just imagine it. I do not know what to see.

Stream some samples below and preorder the LP here, which will be out this September.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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