Deepspace “The Barometric Sea”
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
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With “The Barometric Sun,” Deepspace’s Mirko Ruckels invites his listeners on an epic journey from the beginning of our solar system, on to the farthest corners of the universe, and back again. Throughout our expedition, this intensely visual album leads us into the sun’s corona via sparkling digital chimes, through the swirling galaxies of panning synths, and over a futuristic city composed only of glass.
Our unprecedented voyage begins on “Hymn 1" in the foundation of a warm, undulating bass tone that compliments the digital atmospherics perfectly. On this track, we can almost feel the solar wind gushing past and the absence of gravity exerting its gentle control on us, lifting our feet from the ground. As soon as we encounter the unreal sounds of a choir on “The First Glimpse of the Silent Revolving World,” our disbelief has been permanently suspended, and there is no going back until our expedition of the “The Barometric Sun” is complete.
Every third track on “The Barometric Sun” functions as a necessary interlude. “Silent Revolving World,” “Sungliders,” and “Exit Procedure” are like the dark but peaceful spaces between complex galaxies populated by stars; in an aesthetic sense, they are the connective tissue of this album that work to make it larger than life. These three compositions provide a delicate balance against the blinding sunburst of “Hymn 1" and the emotional intensity of “Crysanthenum Ocean.” Given the immense subtlety of “The Barometric Sun,” the calming ambience of its interludes allows the rest of the album to inhabit brighter shades of color. They cause us to feel haunted by the first dissonance found in “Endless Glass Metropolis,” and to fully realize the expressive search for greater meaning that is “The Faint Hum of Big Forever.”
The production quality of this album is nothing short of immaculate. Every sound is pristine, crisp, and marked by a lingering beauty. Because of its breathtaking timbres and endlessly reverberating drones, the traveler of “The Barometric Sun” never feels threatened by his or her surroundings. We drift past the wondrous sites of our universe enveloped by a sense of comfort and grace, never wishing to return home, but knowing that even after we do, the experience of “The Barometric Sun” will have instilled in us the serenity of perpetual weightlessness.
Christopher Constabile
Review October 2007 from e/i-mag.com
AUDIO VERITÉ / Recordings: clarification, commentary, criticism
INSTALLMENT 15 / December 2007
REVIEWED BY:
Alan Lockett (AL), Max Schaefer (MS)
DEEPSPACE The Barometric Sea (Deepspace)
DEEPSPACE Slow Moving Lifeforms Volume 1 (Deepspace) •
When growing up, Brisbane phonaut Mirko Ruckels was apparently obsessed with deserts, plains and um...deep space—isolated places where he was completely alone, indulging the urge for immersion into and exploration of such places. His attempts to channel that dreamy, detached and lonely feeling into his music are fairly successful on this evidence. His influences are openly admitted, and include Steve Roach, VidnaObmana, Pete Namlook, and Stars of the Lid, meaning it’s (S/s)pace music with both upper and lower case “s”, both celestial and earthly manifestations being embraced. The Barometric Sea, the earlier collection, is a decent debut, and the Deepspace sound is at once familiar and of itself, calculated to appeal to old-school Emusic lovers while including enough of a tweak to make it modish. It does occasionally strike you with that larded over feeling you get from Schnauss-ist “indietronica”, where it’s all Deep and no Space, but tracks like “The Drop of Nowhere” are nicely drawn out into a Stars of the Lid elongation haze. Overall it’s nicely judged. Follow-up Slow Moving Lifeforms Volume 1 is an even better crossover exponent, with a foot in the classic spacemusic camp and another in the ’90s New Wave of Ambient. “Slow Moving Lifeform 1” opens, nestling nicely between mid-period Vidna and one of Eluvium’s more open pieces, or a synthetic rendition of mid-period SotL; there’s that sense of heightened harmonics that can result from artfully minimized melodics. “The Endless Repeat of Waves Onto a Landscape” and “Amniotic Orbit” reinforce the Vidna RoA connection by bringing in a deliberate one-finger piano motif redolent of RoA’s prologue. Swathes of nebulous harmonics are competently choreographed. On “Winter pushes Autumn” we start to experience the symptoms of bloating that come from the the excess sugars of a little too cloying and over-egged a pudding. The New Age morass of Windham Hill is sometimes only a motion away, though the final “Slow Moving Lifeform 3 (closure B)” is a hard-to-resist space hymn with a lilt of the sacral epic to it. (AL)
This is not a review, but we dare to give it 6 stars anyway.
Calmscape get a lot of inquiries from independent artists and indie labels and some of those stands out from the crowd, being better than average. 'Deepspace' is one of those: An ambient project from Mirko out of
