Deepspace
The Barometric Sea
© 2007 Deepspace (634479550034) (format: CD-R)
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Travel the outer systems with Deepspace. Vast, serene and mesmerising ambient music to work/sleep/float around to. Voted one of the Top 3 ambient albums of 2007 by Calmscape. "One of the Best Ambient albums of 2007" - Phil Derby, Electroambient Space
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Deepspace's "The Barometric Sea" has been selected as "must listen" and one of the top 3 ambient albums of 2007 by Calmscape.
CRITICS HAVE SAID:
Best New Artist of 2007 award - Electroambient Space
"Mirko Ruckels is a great new talent, a cross between Steve Roach and Stars of the Lid, with a dash of Budd and Eno." - Phil Derby, Electroambient Space
Top 10 ambient albums of 2007:
Deepspace “The Barometric Sea” – Thoroughly soothing echoing soundscapes, with just the right balance between light and dark as expansive synth sounds breathe alongside sparse piano and other sounds, textures and treatments." - Phil Derby
"Barometric Sea" is ravishing: its purity of tone and static, Zen-like quality is worthy of Aphex Twin. This is a great album in the classic spacemusic mould: subtle, poised and quietly awe-inspiring. - AmbientMusicGuide.com
"The Barometric Sea" Review by Electroambient Space
Mirko Ruckels is Deepspace, a German-born ambient musician who now lives in Australia. A quick read of his blog on his site notes influences and favorite listens include Stars of the Lid, Steve Roach, Telomere, Pete Namlook, Between Interval, and others. If I had to pick one of these that he sounds the most like, it would probably be Stars of the Lid, but he has created a cool niche of his own, a very calming one that is thoroughly enjoyable. It is really fun to listen to tracks like “The Astrology,” because just when you decide that it is pure floating to just chill out to, something percolates in the background and you go, “What was that? Is that on the CD, or something in the next room or outside?” So he forces you to wake just a bit from your dreamy reverie, pay closer attention and confirm what you heard, then go back into “the zone” and just enjoy it. Most of the time, it is expansive synthesizer sounds, but once in a while there is a little bass here, a little piano there, something. “Sol” has a regal feel, almost reverent, as does the title track which follows it, full of resonant metallic tones. “Leaving the Hub” is the longest and one of the mellowest numbers, quietly elegant. But don’t get too comfortable, as distant pounding rhythms appear at the end, somehow fitting perfectly. Musical misdirection continues in “Deserted Factory,” which starts as ambience and drones, then ends as a classical sounding piano piece. But once you expect changes, a track will stay the course, as on the purely ambient and perfectly dreamy “The Drop of Nowhere.” Despite the unexpected turns on occasion, the album has a distinctive sound with a nice even flow. The Barometric Sea is one of the best ambient offerings of 2007.
© 2007 Phil Derby / Electroambient Space
Go on, have a listen. If you want to hear more than is offered here, go to http://www.deepspacehome.com and stream the full album, before buying.
WHAT LISTENERS HAVE SAID:
"You are absolutely amazing. This music definitely puts in a very nice place ...far away from here. Your music soothes my soul, literally, i just love how it matches every thought and feeling i have. Please continue to make beautiful music. You help people more than you know" by Aretha Samuel.
"Hi, just thought I'd say you have a cracker of an album there. It's about time someone got back "out there" by Gary (Little Universe online space/ambient shop)
"Your ambient music is quite amazing, ethereal. It really pulls at the heart setting the stage for a mind's journey into the vast and potential wonders of this universe. Keep it up. =)" by Naervic
"Compliments on your fine debut album, have been listening to this lengthy and highly varied electronic album and do appreciate the vidna reference and inspiration. Hope you'll continue to expand and refine your personal artistic statement as an electronic musician. You're walking the right path..." by vidnaObmana
"I absolutely love your music, its so relaxing"
by Eddie
"Very nice work. Being a game designer I spend a lot of my time (too much of it) listening to music from games and other sources and use it as inspiration for designing the world. I think I found a new inspiration :)" by Andrew from Doomsberg
"Great sound. Maybe I`ll look you up when I need ambient music for my game. Here`s hoping you don`t get too successful too quickly so that I may abuse your sensitive nature for my own benefit." by Theo Brothers
A description of Ambient music, by Deepspace
"If you want to understand what ambient music is....read on.
Have a listen to some of the tracks while you read. Ambient music changes lives. Well, it changed mine anyway. Consider yourself warned.
I was born in Bremen, Germany in 1972. While I have been writing and performing music since the late 80's, I only started writing ambient music seriously around 2000, after spending years earning a living in various conventional rock bands. If I think back to my childhood, I notice, in retrospect, that I was very preoccupied with ambient sounds and moments, which led to my later love affair with this style of music. The sort of sounds I had always been attracted to were: unclear far-away sounds such as planes passing overhead, hearing trains speeding by in the night while I was safe in bed, far-away traffic, distant and simultaneous instances of music (such as what you might hear at exhibitions and showgrounds), lawn mowers churning in the distance on a Saturday morning, orchestras tuning up, building workplaces, with the sound of hammering and drills.
All of these sounds, you may have noticed, are indistinct, and hearing them would often trap me in a day dream. That place you go when you stare into the middle distance.
Visually, I was obsessed with deserts, plains and deep space.... Isolated places, where I was completely alone. I wanted to disappear into these places and to explore them. When I wrote music, I always wanted to enter that zone, and I would continually try to write something that contained that dreamy, detached and lonely feeling.
Why? Well, I believe that the first time that I appreciated this feeling was when I was at home in our little farmhouse in Germany one summer in the late 70's. I must have been around the age of 5. It was a perfect warm summer day, and I was lying on my back, in the yard behind our house. A small plane approached from the distance, and eventually passed over head, flying quite low....and I slipped into a waking dream.....the sound of the plane seemed to last forever. This moment was so vivid yet dreamlike that it's still completely illuminated in my mind, where most of my other memories have gone green and brown at the edges, or have faded away altogether. I think I experienced a moment of perfect happiness, and I guess my only link today to this memory of perfect happiness is the sound of that drone....the propeller churning away, and the detuning effect as the plane passed away into nothingness...
I had recorded a few ambient pieces in the early 1990's without realising it, and loved soaking up this recurring atmospheric feel. I would lapse into this state whilst playing this music, and also while listening to it, so it was a very process oriented thing for me to do. The only real references I had at this stage were new age artists, which were usually cliche ridden and saccharine, yet still shared some of the dreamy aspect of what I longed for. These best of these artists, George Winston, and his Windham hill associates, formed a very strong influence on me. In addition to this, I remember getting a new effect rack for my guitar, a quadraverb, which had this patch in which the reverb would go forever, and everything you played with this sound sounded like a dream or memory. Another important step, later, when I went to Uni, was when I discoverd the french composer Claude Debussy, whose music was wonderfully dreamy, using whole-tone scales, gamelan influenced sounds, and wonderfully vague harmony. I devoured his music, and wrote similar music for guitar, orchestra and piano.
After this, thanks to my friend Cameron, I heard a little known belgian ambient composer called Vidna Obmana, and was completely blown away by his 1994 release, "River of Appearance". The music consisted of sublime slow motion instrumental washes: stretched out fabrics of synthetic colours, nebulous harmony, creating imaginary sensations akin to floating around inside an aquarium. Subtle atmospheric melodies, beams of melodic sunlight, illuminating a secret garden in an underwater grotto. Wow. I was blown away. This was what I had been trying to do. It also turns out that Cameron had a ton of these records already, and he kindly set me on to a few more artists. Then I discovered that quite a few other people had been doing this sort of music for a long time, going back to Brian Eno in the mid 70's. I learned that this music was called Ambient, yet I already knew that it was called this, for some reason. It was what I had already named my initial ambient experiments, going back to when I recorded on my 4 track tape machine, and recorded guitars playing softly in several keys, with massive washes of reverb.
I don't know, but when I heard that other artists were recording similar albums that featured these far away, blurry, dreamy sounds, I fell in love, and consumed just about all of the ambient music I could get my hands on. I discovered Steve Roach, who is most prolific in this genre, and was not suprised to find out that he was concerned with similar things as I was: deserts, and space. "Desert Solitaire" and "The Magnificent Void" were like a friend you'd never met waving at you going: "Hey! Over here! There are more of us!". There were thousands of us, all over the world. Online radio stations like "Star's end", which fostered an international community of star-gazing desert-heads, "SEB: Sleep Environmental Broadcast" were all obsessed with this same thing. Then I discovered Stars of the Lid, a brilliant American ambient act who combined ambient sounds with traditional washed out instruments, bringing a slightly classical feel to the genre. To top it off, I became aware of "Dronezone", on Somafm, which played ambient music 24/7!!
I then discovered an interesting parallel to this ambient music, and that was the post-rave chillout music- while I was never into raves or dance music, I found that composers like Peter Namlook, Gas, and Aphex Twin came out of this scene, responding to the same need as the Eno school- the need to daydream, the need to lose focus, the need for isolation, and the need for an inner world or as DJ Spooky puts it, a new inner 'final frontier' in his brilliant article on ambient music.
The thing that makes me smile is that most people don't even notice this music. They assume it's the sound of a dishwasher or a plane passing by. I'm happy to think that some people are obsessed with it, and some are completely indifferent to it. I think there are some strong commercial possibilities for this sort of music- it creates a state...a consistent feel, and would be idea for say, a hotel foyer, to stream constant ambient music- it would get rid of muzak, and there's one very good thing. Having said that, I'm certainly not interested in pursuing the selling of this sort of music, I'm too busy enjoying it.
Friends of mine still look at me in a strange way, unable to understand what is so special about this largely featureless music- with no distinct melodies and no strong key. One of my friends calls it "Air music" and laughs at the idea of one chord sustained for what seems an eternity. I try to explain, which usually results in blank stares, and some well meaning but non-comprehending nods. When I recently went to the Kranky label site, to which Stars of the Lid are signed, I realised why this music is so important. We need beauty, and conventional music, including classical, rarely delivers it like ambient does. Ambient music is obsessed with beauty. Covers of ambient albums are adorned with images of natures and internal expressionistic states. Computer recording and multitrack home recording is allowing us to capture these inner places: pristine reverb, unlimited voicings, arrays of stereo effects, piled on top of one another, programs like Absynth bring to life the invisible frontier, to soothe our worn, existential ears, in a gentle way. They illuminate the unseen cathedral hovering over the drab, polluted skyline- they find the 'flower' inside the machine, inside us.
Someone said that the orchestra can create sounds that are meant to represent space. Holts' The Planets, Charles Ives' space themed symphonies, or Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra fullfil this desire to a great degree, but a single synthesiser can capture the isolation of space in a way that no orchestra ever can. Listen to Steve Roach's "Structures from Silence" and you will know this to be true. Almost no untreated acoustic instrument can really achieve this. Convential instruments can 'sing' about space, but electronic music becomes space. It seems that the computer/keyboard can therefore express something the orchestra cannot, and the computer in front of me right now contains an entire orchestra of keyboards.
To finish, let me quote somebody who I have forgotten, who said something not regarding ambient music: To those who do understand, there's no need to explain, to those who don't understand, there's no way of explaining."
Dear Listener, I hope you understand.
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Fantastic Work
author: GlennI just had mine arrive and have to say that this is really a must have for anyones music collection