I usually appreciate ambient music as an appetizer rather than a main course. Artists like Chicago's Colorlist, for example, make wonderful use of ambient textures in their succulent analogue and electronic weddings, but if you remove those textures from the sort of compositional frameworks found in most genres, you're left with a style that can easily slip into background-music territory. The ambient-electro act On succeed in some regards, but still fall into many of ambient music's typical trappings.
Your Naked Ghost Comes Back at Night is a collaboration between Chicago percussionist Steven Hess, French composer Sylvain Chauveau, and Norwegian producer Helge Stern, working here for the last time under his moniker Deathprod. Hess and Chauveau wrote and recorded the album using analogue equipment, then handed it off to Stern to remix. Stern's production work is commendable; he preserves a hushed tone through each composition, blurs the distinctions between where Hess ends and Chauveau begins, and textures each track with subtle electronic glitches. So acutely does Stern make his presence felt that I would have assumed this to be an entirely digital work if not for the press release. The dominance of Stern's mix might also contribute to a certain flatness that pervades the album. I imagine that some elements -- Hess' thundering percussion, Chauveau's prepared guitar sound effects -- might have shown more dynamic range in their original form.
As they are, these compositions evoke barren, wind-swept plains, the kind of place where you could hear distant echoes of crying in the night. Only the title track, with its trilling guitar motif (Or is it piano? The remixing renders some of the instrumentation ambiguous), betrays any hints of warmth. The stillness and invariance of each piece make even the most minuscule embellishment ring out as a shot, like the tiny pin-pricks of guitar noise amid the rumble and hum of “Erotique” or the percussive droplets that hammer down with increasing regularity throughout “In the Forest of the Night.” Only the longest tracks (“Façade” at 12 minutes and “The Lonesome Poetry of Mark Rothko” at 17) seem to completely wear out their welcome, exhausting their meager range and the listener's patience well before their runtime is complete.
My problems with Your Naked Ghost… are the problems that I have with ambient music in general: that for all of the latitude in instrumentation and approach the genre allows, the end products usually wind up sounding kind of the same. The sinusoidal rhythms lead to a somewhat predictable development and, quite bluntly, get boring. But if there's something that I can say for On (and probably for ambient artists in general), it's that they force you to be still and focus on the object in ways that our instant gratification generation is no longer used to. The rewards of Your Naked Ghost Comes Back at Night are of a peculiarly esoteric sort, but they are there for those with the patience to find them.
1. Your Naked Ghost Comes Back at Night and Flies Around My Bed
2. Erotique
3. Too Many Demons Still Haunt This Land
4. Oh Run Slowly
5. Façade
6. In the Forest of the Night
7. The Lonesome Poetry of Mark Rothko
