Edge of Forever – Edge of Forever Volume One

April 18, 2011 • self-released

Bandcamp is a fantastic website for amateur musicians to get a bit of a boost in exposure (it's worked nicely for me). I have been so far pleased with the artists I've found there. Edge of Forever is one of many I've stumbled upon through it, and while doesn't go much above most of the amateur music I've heard there and it isn't anything astonishing, it definitely shows a lot of potential for more focused future releases.

Volume One's style is probably best described as a sort of minimalist downtempo, almost to the point of ambient music. The artist uses a lot of very simple, monotonal synth lines but gives them a very spacy feel with echos and layered background ambience. This leads to the album's strongest suit, its firm handle on sound and texture. Different drum beats and a huge variety of synth voices are assembled with surgical care, with some samples, noise, and glitches sprinkled on top, and everything fits together brilliantly. Beats range from minimal glitching to more realistic kit sounds; synths are mostly the shimmering spacy type but there's a lot of variation therein. A good example is one of my favorite tracks, "Resonation", a more chipper tune that shows a considerable amount of Kraftwerk influence (yeah, more reviewer bias again) that has a relatively complex beat that balances out the layers of simple tones well.

My misgivings about this album mostly lie in the songwriting itself; it's very simplistic and repetitive and many of the songs get a bit stale by the time they're over. This is probably mostly due to the incredibly simple melodies that simply repeat over and over and lack of any progression or buildup in each song, although there is the occasional ambient bridge here and there to provide a bit of contrast. Unfortunately the one track that does have a lot of nice buildup is my least favorite, the eleven-minute "The Lake", which has a really annoying introduction and structure that jumps around a bit too much.

But like I said I'm pretty pleased with this album and it's grown on me quite a bit recently. It's best not too listen too carefully since the songwriting isn't great, but sonically and texturally it's wonderful. Here's to hoping Volume Two will show some improvement.

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