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Kelela collaborator Florian TM Zeisig and sound engineer Jordan Juras (aka PVAS) set us adrift in the Bavarian wilderness, red-eyed and zonked, with a buoyant raft of blissed ambient sorcery on their new album for Huerco S.’ West Mineral Ltd. Gorgeous, uplifting gear, tipped if yr into David Moufang’s Studio Pankow and Reagenz collabs, early William Orbit, 154, GAS.
Successor to their Mo Wax flavoured debut album ‘Napping Under God’ (3XL, 2022), the languorous wooze of ‘BonGBoaT’ derives from a week the duo shared soaking up nature in and around a small Bavarian village, where days were spent hiking, boating, and recording flutes in caves - that sort of thing.
The music follows to metaphorically represent that atmosphere on a spiritual, rather than literal, level. Zeisig’s acclaimed feel for lushly variegated texture has already been well documented on these pages, and that space is here beautifully accentuated by the technical suss of Juras, between them bestowing a carefully plotted calmness and soothing conception of environmental ambient for discerning listeners.
The cotton-weft bleep dub of ‘Row’ pushes us off into scenes of lonesome folk strings heard over bobbin waves in ‘Kneippen’, and ‘Mud’ highlights their knack for projecting prismatic fantasies with its 3D swill of murky textures and glittering harp. ’Sky’ clearly recalls Wolfgang Voigt’s somnambulant waft around the Black Forest as GAS, and ‘Heat’ inverts jungle breaks, train horns and smoke puffs as heard from the sea bed. They reserve a voluminous burst of shoegaze bliss for the smudged finale ‘Drift’, lilting into the evocative dread of ‘Night’, calling lights out for listeners probably already firmly slanted to the horizontal.
Not overly sentimental or nostalgic, 'BonGBoaT' is a humid, after-hours descent into waterlogged bliss that takes elements from the dub-ambient canon and floats them into prismatic abstraction, providing much needed succour for the world weary. In other words, all of us."