Marsen Jules – The Endless Change Of Colour

A quasi-amorphous drone is hard to champion, especially one that lasts a full 47 minutes. Marsen Jules is one producer with all the technical and compositional skill to succeed, siding himself with the decayed rave memories and paint washes of Tim Hecker and hauntologist amnesiac ashes of James Kirby. 12k have been back on my integrity radar since the owner Taylor Deupree’s impeccable “Faint”, released late 2012. Marsen Jules takes that symbiotic relationship with the drizzled drone melody to a beehive meld – letting the workers build their imaginal honeycombs. Importantly the melodies are left on a radiator, to dry off in lieu, but never to chafe at their paradigms, too.

The first 15 minutes cottons the earbuds, with a lush assembling of textures. Approximately every 10 seconds there are alterations – to the main lead layer – while new blends Dot-Matrix their presence on the flowing script. Over time you question how the music can be this absorbing, yet, so elementally – it would appear only on the surface anyway – insipid. One drone piece at 47 minutes, means a long time elapses, before the listener has any idea, generally, what they’ve just experienced. The lulling phantasmic-like quality of Jules sets him apart here, though, creating sub-themes of elongated tones, one’s cloying at their anchors, searching for a resolution, and getting the sea alive to this very aquatic / prismatic meshing.

It’s an amazing piece of work, it really is. Just for one how it can put you in an incredibly comforting, soothing trance. Or for two how the structure barely changes, but seems to say “less is more” underneath the veil oh-so-succinctly. The closest in quality these soundscapes resemble recently are the work of Robert Scott Thompson and his “Upon The Edge Of Night” CD on Aucourant. There Thompson also crafted a concomitant circumspect on the contemporary drone milieu, bringing fresh takes to synth work as Jules so masterfully does. But to be just the right kind of drone – not a sibilant dissonance mash-up – this “The Endless Change Of Colour” is right in the mode of one thing: bed time listening with hot coffee. Get!

- Mick Buckingham for Fluid Radio

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