Introduction

HYDROPONIC GARDEN (2003)
1) Central Plains; 2) Tensor; 3) MOS 6581; 4) Silent Running; 5) Neurotransmitter; 6) Hydroponic Garden; 7) Exosphere; 8) Comsat; 9) Epicentre (First Movement); 10) Artificial Island; 11) Refraction 1.33.
There is nothing particularly revelatory about this album, but for once, this actually works in favor of the music rather than against it — Hydroponic Garden is not an exercise in technical innovation, where the listener spends more time trying to «get» the music rather than enjoy it, but just your old-fashioned attempt at creating a vibrant musical landscape. No wonder the opening bassline of ʽCentral Plainsʼ immediately reminds you of Pink Floyd's ʽOne Of These Daysʼ: Hed­berg and Ringström persist in drawing more influence from classic progressive rock and «vin­tage» electronica than from their modern day inheritors.
The record has been described as belonging to the «psybient» genre, whatever that means, be­cause, honestly, if that's a contraction from «psychedelic ambient», then most ambient music is psychedelic to some degree; and beyond that, there is nothing particularly «psychedelic» about Hydroponic Garden — «psychedelia» essentially means opening up an extra dimension of per­ception, usually through various studio trickery, and there's very little actual trickery here, just the standard array of tape loops and samples, all of them handled in a very straightforward manner. But the results are actually better than psychedelic — they're just... beautiful. Well, at least some of them are.
ʽCentral Plainsʼ is constructed out of that relentless bassline, which sounds like a thick, crackling electric wire caught in an eternal wind blast, and a limitless wheat field of synthesizers stretching across the horizon, with breezes and crickets and an occasional snow shower and no signs of man's presence — not a lot of ingredients, really, but the ones present suffice to build up an atmo­sphere of lonesome natural elegance and ominous tension at the same time. I could actually do without the percussive trip-hop rhythms that «enliven» the track towards the end, but I guess the genre somehow demanded that, even if it somehow detracts from the general ambience, unless you want to picture a robot-driven combine harvester rolling across the field as well.
Everything that follows largely falls in two classes of soundscapes — slightly dryer sci-fi abstractions like ʽTensorʼ and ʽNeurotransmitterʼ, clustering around staccato blips and bubbly bass, and warmer «naturalistic» panoramas like ʽExosphereʼ or the title track, with cloudy synthesizers, ghostly vocal harmonies, and nature sounds a-plenty (wind, water, chirping birdies, you know — everything in one's power to produce a convincing balance between manly digital and godly analog). My personal preferences clearly lie with the second kind of tracks, but even the first kind has its merits — particularly impressive is the expert way in which they build stuff up and tear it down, so that the music is static and dynamic at the same time: ʽNeurotransmitterʼ is a great example, with an exciting bass crescendo that gradually rolls upon you and then just as gradually fades away, like you've been lying on an imaginary railtrack and a steamroller was passing above you, inches away from crushing your skull into the ground.
There is, of course, the length issue — 76 minutes of this stuff might seem like overkill, but then we should all be accustomed by now that there is nothing unusual about a modern album sounding like a small chunk from some classic album thrown under a microscope and stretched as wide as it can be stretched. It's a perfectly acceptable length for contemplators of the minuscule and admirers of the little pimples and pustules on the belly of each individual note. It's not really «minimalistic»: despite the lengthy running times of individual tracks, most of them have themes that undergo development, usually by means of additional sound rings slowly penetrating the mix (ʽRefraction 1.33ʼ) or the appearance/disappearance of rhythm tracks. Which is nothing new un­der the sun, but Hedberg and Ringström make this «sonic plant growth» the primary focus of their art — indeed, the whole album is like one huge hydroponic garden, where meticulously generated artificial condi­tions cause luxuriant natural growth.
It's not immediately gratifying, and most people will hardly want to spend so much time trying to focus on all the minor details — but even as background muzak, Hydroponic Garden will still be creating a certain atmosphere of classiness, and, furthermore, this is the kind of electronic music that you can very safely play around people who have little tolerance for electronics, so ultimately traditional and emotionally accessible are its melodies and harmonies. For the lovers of microsound degustation, it might turn out to be a masterpiece; for everyone else, it might turn out to be boring, but not in the boring kind of boring, more like a moody, «there's-still-something-to-it» kind of boring. Personally, I prefer this by far to, say, almost anything by the far more popu­lar, far more overrated Boards Of Canada, and give it an unflinching thumbs up (not that there's any real reason for flinching — the whole experience is as aurally smooth as can be).

WORLD OF SLEEPERS (2006)
1) Abiogenesis; 2) Vortex; 3) Photosynthesis; 4) Get Theory; 5) Gryning; 6) Transmission / Intermission; 7) World Of Sleepers; 8) Proton / Electron; 9) Erratic Patterns; 10) Flytta Dig; 11) Betula Pendula.
No, I'm really not comfortable with this «psybient» term. Or, tell you what: let us keep it, but let's spell it differently — let it be «sci-bient», because this is what these guys really are: they are using ambient landscapes to promote various (but connected) scientific concerns. Look at the track titles here — the very first one is ʽAbiogenesisʼ (a term that I personally abhor as a linguist, because it should literally translate to "birth of non-life" rather than the surmised "birth of life from non-life"), where the music is supposed to serve as a metaphor for... well, you know. (It's a little odd that life had to originate to such perfectly programmed trip-hop beats, but then again, you weren't there, and certain carbon-based lifeforms already were. It's also odd that Nature gave signals to "wake up" in perfect English, transferred over imperfect radio waves, but that's what you get when Anglo-Saxon revisionism of natural history eats up the minds of even the starkest Scandinavian resistants).
Birth and various ways of functioning of life, as seen not from a religious, but from a fully upda­ted modern scientific perspective — and all the attached ecological concerns as well — this is what constitutes the «philosophic core» of World Of Sleepers, and it's all fine and dandy, but if you only had the music and no titles (or occasional vocal samples) to proffer any guidance, I am not certain that the symbolism could be so easily decoded. With a stronger rhythmic base than last time, but without any ominously overwhelming bass lines, most of the tracks here are just soft synthesized sound patterns over potentially danceable beats; sometimes pretty, sometimes suspenseful, but not particularly suggestive of monumental natural processes.
Thus, I suppose that ʽBetula Pendulaʼ, for maximum authentic effort, should probably be listened to on a nice, warm, slightly cloudy day, within the confines of an actual birch grove, illustrating the slim, elegant grace of nature (rather than the artificial consequences of a slash-and-burn ap­proach to agriculture that usually results in the appearance of birch colonies, but that's sort of beyond the point). In this setting, the interaction between clouds, birch leaves lazily swaying in the breeze, and CBL's slowly overlapping synth loops, gradually pushing each other out of existence without any malicious intent, is bound to achieve its double purpose — make you un­consciously eco-conscious, and become analogously charmed by digital software.
Likewise, the best way to enjoy ʽPhotosynthesisʼ is get yourself a textbook, learn all the details of the process, and then try to correlate them with the various stages of the composition, which gradually builds up from the same soft waves of keyboard ambience to a dynamic groove with «acid» elements, while a concerned male voice keeps asking the question "what about the fo­rests?", probably sampled from some environmentalist documentary or other (doesn't really mat­ter). ʽVortexʼ must have your mind spinning around as the main keyboard line is looped around the usual electronic windwall, creating, if not a real vortex, then at least a spiral; with ʽProton / Electronʼ, you probably have to think of yourself as a neutron, caught without a charge in be­tween the negative high-pitched pipsqueaks of the electron and the positive satisfied bass grunts of the proton; and as for ʽErratic Patternsʼ, I honestly have not been able to notice any, so I guess this must be some sort of hint — maybe the erratic pattern is you, as opposed to the perfectly sequenced mid-tempo groove of the track.
In the end, even if common opinion usually selects World Of Sleepers as CBL's peak, my own impression is that the album is slightly weaker than its predecessor — the atmosphere is just too soft and snoozy throughout, with nothing to really shake you up like that Floydian bassline at the beginning of ʽCentral Plainsʼ; and also, it seems to be making much more of a compromise with contemporary electronics than they used to, which somewhat dulls the impact. On many of these tracks, they could have made the electronic veils more thick and imposing, rather than sticking to the same kind of thin, ghostly sound that makes everything sound the same in the end. But all that said, the results are still impressive — a long, humble ode to Life as an accumulation of patterns that organize system out of chaos and then, through ever-increasing complexity, create the sub­jective impression of chaos once again. I sort of get that, even if it takes a trip of reason rather than an impulse of the heart to do so. In any case, a thumbs up.
INTERLOPER (2010)
1) Interloper; 2) Right Where It Ends; 3) Central Plain; 4) Supersede; 5) Init; 6) Euphotic; 7) Frog; 8) M; 9) 20 Minutes; 10) Polyrytmi.
I forgot to mention that, apparently, not only are all those album covers geometrically and styli­stically similar to each other, but even the tracks run in completely continuous order: thus, ʽIn­terloperʼ here is numbered 24, implying that the LP is to be understood as the third part of a com­plete whole — and, as it turned out later, the last part, although there's nothing here to instinctive­ly indicate any sort of grand completion of one's purpose. But if The Artist tells you so, then The Artist must be right, because there's nothing more sacred than The Original Artistic Intention. Even the almighty gods cower and recede before the stunning power of the OAI, so what's to be said of a simple humble reviewer?
Nevertheless, the simple humble reviewer will try to gather all the nastiness he can muster and state that Interloper brings no surprises to the table — it is still masterful, but it seems that the duo's grasp is weakening, as the sonic-emotional effect of most of these tracks becomes restricted to almost dangerous levels of subtlety. The title track features a single delay-treated electronic loop played out against a background of stately, but shallow-sounding Eno-esque synth tapestries: well-constructed, I admit, but so effortlessly sliding through the senses that I cannot, for the life of me, visualize it or emotionally experience it in any way. Not too pretty, not too ugly, and not even representative of an exciting parallel universe. I mean, if those were the sounds of a parallel universe, I might consider settling there (it's always a good perspective to settle down in a place where "nothing ever happens"), but go there as a tourist? No way.
The only track where something does happen is ʽRight Where It Endsʼ, with its more sharply expressed trip-hop rhythms, acid keyboard lines, and evil whispers. Incidentally, fans of the album often complain of this very track as disrupting the flow — I understand them perfectly, but the complaint can only register if you are really taken in by the flow; if you don't think the flow's too cool, then a little bit of disruption is actually good for the health. At least there's a definite feel of suspense and concealed danger here, and that's a good thing, because what's a parallel universe, really, if it's all safer than a mother's womb?
Everything else, well... my biggest beef is that it's way too long and way too even. The best masters of ambient, like it or not, still have ways to shift the mood from track to track, or at least to capitalize on a few brilliantly selected chord sequences. On Interloper, tones and overdub structures matter far more than chord sequences, and when there are discernible chord sequences, they sound way too much like adult contemporary (for instance, the melody of ʽ20 Minutesʼ could have very easily be encountered on a Phil Collins solo album, although he'd never bother to wrap it up in so many additional layers, of course). Or, when they hit upon a good one, they can spoil the moment with a totally unnecessary and generic percussion track (ʽInitʼ, which starts out beautifully, but do they really want us to slow-dance to it or what?).
With repeated listens, you can probably get used to the softness of it all, and, most importantly, Interloper preserves the warm human spirit that has always characterized CBL, but I have to confess that I thought better of them when they were drawing their influences in about equal measures from Eno, Tangerine Dream, and Floyd, than now, when they seem to be so much concentrated on «light» rather than «darkness» — because light always shines brightest in con­trast with darkness; and these guys are good, but not good enough to become absolute Gods of Light — the more they try to be, the more boring the results become. So, not a thumbs down, but definitely a step down from the quality of the previous two albums, although I think we really saw it coming (with music like this, holding on to an exciting standard for very long is downright impossible — not even a musical genius like Eno could boast a decade-long uninterrupted career of ambient masterpieces).
VLA (2011)
1) VLA.
Short for Very Large Array, apparently, a radio astronomy observatory in New Mexico, known for important observations on black holes, protoplanetary discs, and other stuff that makes great fodder for young aspiring artists of the «sci-bient» variety. There's not much to describe — it's just one hour-long track consisting of a steady hum, recurrently shifting pitch back and forth. If you listen very closely, you will hear occasional additional sounds: some distant cling-clanging, a few lines of faraway electronic pulses, faint echoes of what may or may not have been voices... basically, you will find yourself in the role of a SETI specialist desperately searching for anything that might pass for a sign of extraterrestrial life. And failing, of course.
It would be too easy to call the experiment CBL's Thursday Afternoon — no matter how mini­malistic, Eno's hour-long static panorama could still qualify as music, whereas this here is just sound, with no melodic component whatsoever. Nevertheless, both are similar in that (a) you can basically play them starting at any point and shut them off whenever you like to and (b) the parts are actually very subtly different, but the difference is purely formal unless you agree to study the data under a microscope, and who'd want that? Also, strange enough, VLA actually works as a background setting — that hum certainly isn't «emotionally rewarding» in any sense, but I have listened to it all the way through while being busy with other matters, and it never got on my nerves, which might just be the point of the album. See, the whole thing represents the Vastness of Space, and if the Vastness of Space gets on your nerves, you probably don't belong in it.
I am certainly not going to go head over heels about it and spew nonsense about how listening to this record should expand our mind and enhance our conception of space and perceive our own limited, minuscule, and totally insignificant existence in this universe as merely a random blip in the overall immanent texture. (I mean, it's all true, but why not read a good book on cosmology instead?). But if you have an hour-long important job to do and you want to get a little bit of that «me so importantly locked up in my ivory tower with a telescope and stars for companionship» feel to help you get the job done, VLA might just be the perfect recipe for such an occasion. At the very least, it will make the time pass quicker... or slower, depending on the circumstances.
TWENTYTHREE (2011)
1) Arecibo; 2) System; 3) Somewhere In Russia; 4) Terpene; 5) Inertia; 6) VLA (edit); 7) Kensington Gardens; 8) Held Together By Gravity.
For the weak-willed and feeble-minded, the very same day upon which Carbon Based Lifeforms introduced us to the sonic monumentality of VLA (July 23, 2011) also saw the release of a «nor­mal» album — so, if you are spiritually baffled and morally destroyed by the sixty minutes of ʽVLAʼ, here is a nice little compromise for you: ten minutes of ʽVLAʼ (in the form of an edit), plus seven other seven-to-ten minute tracks that pretty much do the same thing — only in several different ways. It's kind of like spending your time in a museum: would you want to spend one hour of your time staring at one fabulous landscape, or divide that time between eight different ones? Actually, the correct answer would depend on many circumstances (starting with the in­dividual quality of the pictures and ending with the individual quality of your soul), but here we won't be getting too pretentious about that, and just admit that VLA is an extreme, and Twenty­three feels quite accessible in its company.
It also feels somewhat more pleasing to me than its two predecessors — despite the stark mini­malism and a complete shift to the hardcore ambient paradigm. The major reason is that the silly electronic beats are gone: they never really needed them anyway, and now that the music no longer pretends to invite you to dance, you can just tune in with the cosmos and stuff, because, you know, The Creator has a Masterplan and it doesn't necessarily involve all the living things getting into a trip-hop groove or anything. It does involve various atmospheric shifts and transi­tions, though, and there's plenty here, from track to track.
Again, the composers are jumping from macro- to microcosm here: ʽAreciboʼ, with its obvious reference to the Arecibo Observatory, is clearly influenced by planetary movement, whereas ʽTerpeneʼ should probably induce you to feel the smell of conifer resin (at the very least, there is definitely something sticky-liquid-like about the wobbly flow of its programmed loops). ʽInertiaʼ brings you back to the world of intertwining underground caverns, with gentle gurgling streams trickling through and harmless night owls and bats hooing off echoes (although why it is called ʽInertiaʼ, we'll never know); ʽSystemʼ is the closest they come to transmitting the idea of being lost in space.
ʽSomewhere In Russiaʼ, one of the few tracks with the very, very faint presence of an underlying beat, probably means Chukotka rather than Moscow — somewhere, in short, where temperatures are quite low and human presence is scarce. In direct contrast, ʽKensington Gardensʼ are lively, replete with tolling bells, singing birds, and echoes of what seems to have once been noises made by children and other visitors — yet now there's a certain ghostliness to it all, and, in fact, many of these tracks could be thought of as coherently conceptual, like it's a record about a universe that suddenly, for no particular reason, found itself devoid of people. I mean, most ambient albums give off an air of total solitude, but Twentythree quite specifically feels like an odd deconstruction project, where you have a soundscape that is densely populated by actual people, and then, whoosh, all human presence has been erased and only faint echoes remain.
It probably wouldn't have hurt them to find at least a few strikingly impressive melodic lines for some of these tracks, rather than resort to the usual «glide one note into another so that nobody even notices» technique — but the music still works, and the tracks seem alive and meaningful in the vein of all those old Klaus Schulze records. At least I can say that it made me feel like the only living man on Earth for a brief while, and I'd rather get that from music than from a VR headset, so while I'm still hesitant to move my thumbs in the presence of hardcore ambient, let us count this as an endorsement of sorts.
REFUGE (2013)
1) Rca (+); 2) Birdie; 3) Rca (-); 4) Leaves; 5) Lost; 6) Escape; 7) Marauders.
CBL's output rates seem to have slowed down considerably since Twentythree — the only com­plete album in five years has been this soundtrack for an obscure indie movie that allegedly tells some sort of macabre story about one family's survival after a mass catastrophe and is usually pigeonholed in the «survival horror» genre. You'd think that CBL, of all people, would be the most uncanny choice for composer — but I guess this was precisely the point, to have a couple of people known for making some of the most serene music in the universe to lend their hand in the creation of a disturbing, suspense-based movie. Then again, you don't really need to go farther than ʽCentral Plainsʼ to be reminded that these dangerous Danes (Swedes, really, but «dangerous Danes» rings so much cooler) can also be fairly threatening and suspenseful once they get the opportunity to saddle that vibe.
That said, there is not much about Refuge, an uncharacteristically short (less than 45 minutes!) collection of ambient soundscapes very much in the vein of Twentythree, that would suggest dan­ger or threat — at least, not immediate ones. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that the artists simply used up some of the outtakes from previous sessions: most of the tracks sound like less elaborate little brothers to their far more thoroughly polished elders. Everything sounds nice, elegant, melancholic, but without too much depth: ʽLeavesʼ, for instance, floats on a shiny, multi-layered, but common bed of synth tones with a repetitive two-note drip-drop landing on them at regular intervals — well, we've heard that kind of «look at how elegant the universe is in its static mode and how all life is just a regularly ordered icing on top» musical metaphor so many times now that it is futile to expect some new epiphany. But it's pretty, all the same.
The best track is arguably ʽRca (-)ʼ, with a steady, carefully orchestrated electronic crescendo that Godspeed You! Black Em­peror might well have appreciated — it's a little lost out there in the middle, but it well deserves your undivided attention for about four minutes, with layer upon layer of synth added until you really start getting the impression of climbing the proverbial stair­way to heaven, as the air becomes sharper, the temperature colder, and the intuitive feeling of a supernatural presence more and more distinct. Unfortunately, even GY!BE would probably com­plain that the track is much too short, and the climax is over way too quickly, for the track to become truly cathartic. The soundtrack curse, striking again and again!
The only time the record actually comes close to becoming «scary» is, amusingly, on its most optimistically labeled track — ʽEscapeʼ, structured as soft techno with a deep, almost subconsci­ously planted, bassline and, on top, populated with what sounds like a series of alien explosions, coming from faraway but powerful enough to resonate all over your living room. That sound is so atypically harsh for CBL that the track really stands out, and in quite a respectable way at that, although eventually it morphs into full-scale danceable techno, and the explosions are almost lost against a foreground of much less interesting loops and effects. And then, for the last track (ʽMa­rauders"), we return back to the same predictable world of static serenity (well, dark serenity this time — sounds like all those other «out there in space, watching faraway nebulae» tracks of theirs), lightly sprinkled with electronic chirps from interplanetary-flying birds on their way to the nearest warphole.
In short, nice and, like almost everything from these guys, perfectly listenable, but a soundtrack is a soundtrack — or, rather, a soundtrack is a collection of second-rate material that you wouldn't normally want to include on a «proper» LP, especially when you're a loyal disciple of Tangerine Dream. (Okay, not that loyal. Being loyal to TD necessarily implies a schedule of at least three albums per year, proportionally increasing at the same rate at which the artist is running out of new ideas.) For major fans only, I'd say; others will just have to wait and find out if there is still another Taoist way left for CBL to tell us how wonderful and mysterious can a world be in which, for all it's worth, nothing is really happening.

CARIBOU (+ MANITOBA)