Entry 414 - Equal Stones - Hands of a Murderer

 

It's so hard to do droning ambient well. So often the genre gets caught up in itself and it forgets to have any sort of interesting thing going on. Sometimes this leads to singular tones going on for dozens of minutes with little to no progression... that may be some people's thing, it is not mine. Equal stones almost falls into that trap, but somehow manages to create an album that avoids it entirely.

Hands of a Murderer sounds like it should be a violent album, filled with dark atmospheres and chilling moments. It is the opposite. This is a warm, synth pad driven piece of droning ambient. The individual tracks all have a similar structure to them. They each have a theme that repeats slowly throughout the course of the track, yet by the end of the track it sounds quite different than it did at the start.

How did that happen? I really am not sure, but when listening to these tracks over the course of the last few days the same thing happens. The track begins in one fashion and ends up in a very different place. Sometimes its easy to spot the shift, like on My Reflection is Empty. Most of the composition is a droning, melody-less ambient fog... however towards the end a piano comes in and drives the song to one of the most melodic sections in the entire album.

Other tracks like I Will Always Be There start with a repeating melody that slowly morphs over the 9 minute play time. By the end of the composition the atmosphere has changed from that of a clear day reflecting the sunlight in water to that of a dense fog that obscures anything that would lie within it. I'm not sure what type of transition I like more, but I do like the variety shown within the album.

Equal Stones is now two for two in interesting albums. I'm not sure which one I like more, and I still don't know if I like or dislike either of them. What I do know is that I find this style fascinating and it keeps me coming back for repeated listens. In my experience this is never a bad thing.