Written by: Dave Cantrell

As a writer one often asks oneself if perhaps they don’t lean a little too heavily on certain words and for me, aside from (among many others) the already-used ‘perhaps,’ the verb ’emerge’ and its adjectival offspring ’emergent’ quite frequently, I feel, find themselves pressed into service to help convey the mood and movement of a piece of music as heard in real time. And while I often, to one degree or another, chide myself for such over-reliances – the drive to avoid what I’m choosing to term ‘weak thesaurus syndrome’ could hardly be stronger – it’s nonetheless the case that given the fact that A) as rich as it is there are still only so many words in the English language and B) I have of late begun wading into the shoals of ambient music for reasons I’ll get to in a sec, I’m afraid that usage of that particular mother word and all its clingy dependents is pretty much unavoidable.

As I suspect is the case for many of my generation that came of true musical age in the late 70s, my first encounter with ambient composition was Eno’s 1979-released Ambient 1 (Music For Airports). Drawn to the record by the already astonishing reputation of the guy’s name on the jacket – among a certain cohort Brian Eno kind of owned the Seventies, though for those of us still in our early twenties at that decade’s tailend, made most aware of the guy via Roxy Music and, more immediately, his production work with the Talking Heads, earlier explorations of this sort (Music For Films, the Cluster and Roedelius collabs) would need to be discovered in retrospect post-MFA – once the shrink wrap came off and the needle hit the lead-in, something seemed to subtly shift in my brain’s chemistry as the record played out and it’s hard to explain but sitting here reliving that moment forty-five years later I can at least say that it shocked me by steadying me, it was as if it were an epiphany written in silence now translated into music and it reshaped my relationship to sound from that point forward. And though I didn’t thereafter become an ‘ambient obsessive’ – I’m far too restive and impetuous for that – that record did at least instill in me a strong receptivity built forever on the understanding of ambient’s potential to move me. I still go back to it now and again as if in some deeply innate need to recalibrate my listening instruments but as often as not, at least lately, I’ve not had to rely on that personal ür-text but instead just wait for Kramer’s next venture into those mindful canyons whether it be on the solo tip or, more often of late, in the company of a similarly-inflected artist and, well, here we are with Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road, released via Shimmy-2022 March 22nd, created in partnership with fellow aural mood traveler Mark Nelson whose long-running project Pan•American has plowed similar atmospheric furrows for over a quarter century now. The results, as you may well imagine, intrigue unfailingly, engaging the inner ear and the vast, too often uncharted expanse behind it with soundscapes that present as if mystery and serenity are identical twins separated at birth.

Emerging  – yep, no better word – as if from the mists and silver-threaded spider webs stringing from branch to branch on a crisp and still spring morning, opener “Floating Island” is so evocative of that peace shrouded in the unknowable we may as well declare it the official soundtrack to a day’s awakening be it in Eden Eden or Eden, North Carolina (beauty is beauty, after all, no matter where encountered). To say a certain precedent’s been set, one honed with a sharp – and shared – intuitive grace that manifests as a kind of inscrutable drive is, of course, a predictable understatement, a fact that in no way diminishes the actual accomplishment at hand. The quiet beauty here, quite frankly, astounds.

Touched as much by yearningness as it is an opaque peace, “Plants Used For Weaving” indeed suggests a lush and lonely moment at the marsh side, tones plashing against one another as a gentle tide pushes itself up the delta. Naturally, this being the type project it is, the properties of water are metaphorically apt to a point of being inevitable (hence the presence of the, well, aqueous “Aquaculture,” “Groundwater” with Nelson’s guitar pinging drop-like throughout the mix, echoing and crystalline, and penultimate track “Floating Epitaph,” the funereal buoyancy of the droning presence that underlies it defining ‘elemental’) but what one needs to remember in that regard is, for a substance so critical to human existence as oxygen and nitrogen and language, how damned mysterious and mesmerizing water is despite how everywhere it is in our lives. And, to follow that flow of thought a bit further, one might reasonably tease out the link between the musical/lingual quality we’ve been hearing in the movement of water pretty much since the dawn of consciousness and the genre under consideration in this review, not least since (beyond the fact that nothing, after all, is more ambient that the sound of water) the noting of water’s voice requires, to no small degree, a quieted mind just as, as it happens, the creating of art does. It’s a connection that, for this listener anyway, explains the compellingness of the quiet that so engages us, and this record, as well as any I’ve heard in quite some time, succeeds to that end with a soft, exquisite force.

Be it the howling sensurround of “Boundary Fence,” its sharp glistening aspects shored up by a shifting mosaic of darker intonations that suggest said fence’s boundaries are of a more conjured construct than most, “A Mountain is an Ancestor”‘s wistful touch of melancholia wherein the gone are always present, “The Caretaker,” seeming to forever hover above its own shadow, or the more or less title track “On Redding Road” summoning the incidental but unforgotten images of shimmering exhaust and those mirages of, again, water that we often see on the road surface beneath traffic on hot summer days (which isn’t to mention the 11-minute “For GW” – hushed and touching and sonorous – that closes the record, phasing through its many shifts and strands like a memoriam carved from the silences of grief and appreciation), the work on Reverberations does just that, redounding with a sort of limbic insistence throughout the clutter of our everyday consciousness, guiding one sans any actual focused guidance but instead in a determined if rudderless way toward a conclusion that, however one arrives at it, has us understand that the only certainty is mystery which, we think you’ll agree, beats the daily alternative, for one, and for two, is exactly the state of being in which love and art and wonder and all such other such worthwhile aspects of this shared lonely existence aren’t only nurtured but thrive. [pick up Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road here beginning March 22nd]