Surface Detail
GAS
My music tastes seem to be dictated heavily by the seasons. When spring and summer come around I tend to listen to the down-tempo electronica. When the weather gets colder, I tend to more radiohead, NIN and so-on. I bought the epic (4.5 hours long) Nah Und Fern by GAS few months ago after seeing it being recommended on the iso50 blog, but being a very chilled ambient electronica album, it was out of my seasonal music sync. I tried listening to it, but just couldn’t get into it. It was too cold, too relaxed, to enjoy in the middle of winter. Then today, as winter starts winding down and we see some sun here in Australia, I give the album another listen, and it suddenly works. It’s actually a collection of four albums, with long, slow-moving tracks that gently ebb and flow, with deep, repetitive beats, each track bleeding into the other. Certainly, if I was introducing someone to electronica, this would not be the album; it’s inaccessible unless you know the language and the forms that it uses (some would say boring). But if you do understand this form, you are in for a very relaxing and enjoyable album. Highy recommended.