Entry 1615 - BVdub - Heartless

Style: hazy ambient

Thoughts: Every now and then when I write for this blog there's an album that stands out one way or another. An album that I have fond memories of. An album that I've been on the hunt for a long time. An album that creates a sort of epiphany - either in my life or musically. In one way or another Heartless is all of these things and more.

I have been searching for this album at a reasonable price for nearly seven years. I have so many stories trying to find it. I found it on a record stores website only for it to be out of stock. I got messaged by a close friend that it was available nearby, by the time I was able to respond the record was gone. Another friend informed me that a decently priced copy was on Discogs. Again, gone by the time I saw it. I felt like I was cursed. 

Finally though, FINALLY - I have one of the finest records that BVdub has ever created. I have Heartless.

BVdub creates ambient music that is nearly instantly recognizable as his own. Within a few moments of one of his works I can tell. It's the atmosphere, it's the production, it's the way the music presents itself, it's the feeling of desolate solitude that permeates every moment. It's all of this and so many things that I can't even perpetuate into words.

Heartless itself is an album of shorter compositions (for BVdub). Consisting of eight tracks, each song still is a formidable length, however not the twenty minute epics that the artist is capable of. The shorter length allows BVdub to explore more themes than one would typically hear on one of his albums. While all similar in scope the execution is quite varied. 

The opener, Sleepless for instance, features a dense atmosphere that builds and builds until it seemingly reaches a climax. At that very moment though all of the music drops out except a singular piano note. A small string of notes follow to weave together the simplest of melodies. It subverted my expectations as I was expecting a huge bombastic climax, what we got instead was the exact opposite. Small, fragile, delicate. In many ways this is more profound than anything Brock could have done by having an explosion of sound. Rather we now have an explosion of emotion.

This constant build and contract is found throughout the album but in different forms. Heartless loves to play with my emotions as I listen to it. It's overwhelming at one moment, only to be entirely transparent the next. It's an album that never stops subverting my expectations, and continues to only cater to itself. 

In many ways Heartless is one of the finer albums that I've listened to in a long while. Sure there are plenty of good ambient albums, plenty of good albums that bring out emotions in me... but not the way that Heartless does. It digs deep and messes with me. It finds my base emotions and toys with them, molds them to what it wants me to feel, not what I want to feel. An album that I can now finally say that I have and will never let go of.