Pausal - pausal ep (2009, Highpoint Lowlife)

Originally released in 2007 as a three track web EP, written, played and recorded between 2005 and 2007, re-edited with a bonus track in 2009, this EP is the first release of Pausal (their first album, "Lapses", is now out too).

Pausal is Alex Smalley (Alpine, Olan Mill) and Simon Bainton, both from UK and living in rural Hampshire. They nest themselves in the sub-genre of soundscape / ambient / drone music with a tendency towards warm pastoral evocations à la Stars of the Lid.

It opens with the sound of grasshoppers in a large meadow, one summer night, but slowly drone waves invade the scene with the immensity of the sky and it's like we are absorbed by darkness, with a sky covered with dark clouds which could give birth later to a thunderstorm, but it's not the time now. "Heroes=Dogs" slowly envelops us magisterially and the field recordings recede until disappearance and we are left within a cathedral of curling clouds. 

"Song From A Cloth Pocket", when the night turns to blue, with the sun rising, taking deep breaths of pure air somewhere on the rocky top of a hill, feeling how time flows and how the day invades the landscape like water melancholy of cello, reflecting its first rays on a lake as a daily serenade as a group of geese crosses the sky, while frosted grass sparkles.

"Place (Revisited)" with a constant layer of organ is more about looking at burbling water or leaves dancing in the wind, or when differences of temperatures of the air makes the vision of the landscape blurry, there is something angelic, like a choral of motifs that rises an dissolve before returning to quietness.

"Semi Submerged" is the bonus track of this new release, recorded at the same period and more in phase with the nineties early wave of ambient electronic music it is still very satisfying with the slow repetitive pulsating of wave of sound and its hypnotic, almost inebriating effect.  

Maybe Pausal is not reinventing the wheel but their approach reveals it self to be highly valuable and invigorating. Highly recommended.

http://www.myspace.com/pausal

http://highpointlowlife.com/