Established, prolific sound artists Phillip Wilkerson and Chris Russell come together from different sides of ambient electronic music; whereas Wilkerson favors lighter passages, Russell favors the dark and abstract--yet these styles blend seamlessly on Dark Measures, their latest collaboration on Spotted Peccary Music. This new release retains the dreamlike atmosphere of their 2014 work Vague Traces while ferrying the listener to a more contemplative space. Russell describes Vague Traces as "a sunset album" and Dark Measures as "a nighttime adventure."
And the spirit of adventure hums beneath these eight compositions. The pensive drift of "Unopened Doors" evokes a long moonlit walk as its reverberant glimmers mirror the watching stars. On "Myriad Visions," electronic pulses, crafted from a computer-based virtual "modular" synthesizer, gallop through a maze of cosmic tones, stuttering like thunder interrupted, beckoning the listener onward into an exhilarating and alien space. Penultimate track "Unbroken Devotion" builds to a zenith of yearning, bright as a pillar of moonlight in a forest clearing, before an ominous hum clouds away the light. Finale "Faring Forward" ends the adventure in a place of serenity as its panoramic warmth expands like a sunrise.
On their previous collaboration, Wilkerson sent near-finished tracks to Russell, but on Dark Measures, they built each piece together from the ground up, utilizing a carefully selected palette of digital synthesizers and computer software sound sources, including such venerable instruments as the Yamaha Montage 6, Access Virus digital synth, Native Instruments' Reaktor and Kontakt, and Spectrasonics Omnisphere. The result is an album that weaves their talents into a new, unified sound--an album that traverses the calm and menace of night, and captures the tension and wonder of exploring uncharted spaces.