LOSS

A fairly intriguing dark ambient experience. I'd say this album is much more interesting than anything else Bass Communion and Continuum ever did.

Though the album ain't that long (less than 40 minutes), it worths ten 80-min long minimaist ambient pieces. Throughout the album we can hear disturbing pianos and electric noise. Together they're creating excellent dark atmosphere.

When I was listening to the first part, I constantly thought of those old abandoned houses, photos of which you may find in the booklets from Opeth releases. Needling high-pitched pianos are really chilling here. This music is really spooky and dark, and at the same time it's excellently sad. It really might make you feel like you've just lost someone dear and beloved.

In the second part piano sounds like thunder or very big brass bells. It creates even more suspense that you may find in the first part. Anyway, listening to this I felt like a character from Hitchcock's "Vertigo"!

Those parts altogether, as I said before, are falling into one essential ambient experience. I said, essential. So I can't give it less than five stars. Excellent work.

Wicked tongue say that, like Apple addicts will buy anything with a the Apple logo on it, Steven Wilson's faithful would be just elated if their next Burning Shed package came with a blank CD and a weird picture in it.

Well, Loss is dangerously close to this hypothetical package. We bought it on a picture disc, purely as an act of idolatry. There is a depiction of what looks like an infant, lying in what looks like a casket, and there is a long-haired figure on another side. All tinted in tarnished bronze.

Unfortunately, music in the conventional sense of the word is completely amiss. There is a vague and amorphous sequence of "menacing" distorted sounds. Which is sounds, and not music. On Loss, Wilson isn't even bothering to create a semblance of a soundscape.

Yes, I know what minimalism is .. minimalism is putting more meaning into less talking. Minimalism is precise and not random. And Bass Commuion's Loss could have been a product of collaboration between a napping cat and a brick (the former lying across the keyboard of a synthesizer, and the latter holding the sustain pedal down.

Loss if a lament to love lost, and it is a mournful question. Can the dead communicate with the living? With his lone lonely piano, and its canvas of white noise, Steven Wilson depicts tormented souls of both living and dead, lost, afraid, alone. It is essential about death, and the communication with the dead through technology, but atmospherically, emotionally, it explores themes beyond these; unfit for words. The only conventional instrument appearing is piano, most often performing dissonant notes, manipulated to give a beautiful sense of - you guessed it - loss. Pure ambience is the second instrument here. Footsteps, chiefly. Effects also run amok, giving texture to the sounds that imply, perhaps, it is all taking place in the room next to you; beneath you. Electronic influence is subtle: expect no keyboards or such. The electronics here are merely in production.

Essentially, this is mournful minimalism, executed with experimental and avant-garde methods. It is always soft, and unlike the Continuum projects, it never rises much in volume. It is infinitely haunting, but divinely spiritual and moving, as well. It is a unique brand of ambient music, done with class and style. So many emotions can be milked out of this music that my interpreting it is nearly futile. I will end my review here.