'Close, But Not Too Close'
by Wes Willenbring

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Close, But Not Too Close sees Willenbring develop on the gorgeous palette of tones explored on acclaimed debut Somewhere, Someone Else. As with Willenbring’s debut, Close, But Not Too Close is all about time in both it’s broadest and most discrete sense. There is a deliberation present in it’s composition that makes for a level of engagement far beyond any easy notion of what ambient music is or should be.

The album opens with the elegiac organ drones of ‘I’m Looking Forward To Your Funeral’, immediately setting the scene for this shadow filled, introspective, eight-song opus. The track showcases Willenbring’s masterful balance of passage and destination. The wonderfully received single ‘Oh, Most’ is submerged in icy washes of guitar, under which piano and bass meet in a rhythmic valium struggle. A plaintive cyclical piano line leads ‘My Ghostly Fingers’ before being joined by vacillating Mellotron flute lines as if Satie had fallen to dream. The classical guitar lines in ‘The Burrow’ literally dig into your subconscious, from where a warm yet unearthly Mellotron acts as a kind of embrocation.

‘For All The Strays’ would have sounded perfectly at home on Willenbring’s debut with it’s dry, pure electric guitar tones, delicately placed piano chords in the foreground and smears of drone threatening in the distance. This bridging of melody and texture, of form and formlessness, time and time again draws the listener into territory that is at once unknown yet intimately familiar – a place that is as marked by notions of transformation as it is by melancholy.

Track Listing: