Christian Doil – Maschinen

With Maschinen, the German sound artist Christian Doil continues down his singular path through the world of ambient sound, this time delivering a set of tracks exploring the depths of the sounds of machinery. Christian’s stated goal for this album was to create what he calls “microcosmic realms inside different machines”, based upon recordings of the sounds of machinery around him. As is typical of his work, in Maschinen he seems fascinated with the art of manipulating field recordings, as if to see how far he can take the familiar sounds of everyday life and transform them into unrecognizable and strangely beautiful music. In this album, he took his recordings of a variety of diverse machines – an automobile, a CD player, toaster, coffee machine, camera, electric shaver, telephone, various computer equipment, and other devices – and reconstructs them, rendering astonishing textural ambient music of the highest order, creating “microcosmic spaces” that are as intriguing as they are oddly comforting. Setting aside the cleverness of Christian’s method, the music itself simply delights. Christian has always demonstrated a surprising capacity for extracting the music hiding inside of the mundane sounds around us, but with Maschinen, he has really outdone himself. The music tends towards the textural, with what some might interpret as a dark ambient sound, but really there is something here for everyone. Only Christian Doil could take the sounds of a washing machine and turn it into compositionally strong and exceptionally listenable music, but with nary a melody or a hint of tonality despite the undeniable musicality of the result. Consequently, I think this album will appeal not only to fans of dark ambient, experimental music, and noise, but also to fans of more tonal forms of ambience. Truly a superb work by a master of sound design and ambient composition. Download it for free @ Earth Mantra!