Cameron Bower: Iceberg | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Cameron Bower has been around for a minute in music. He’s done time in rock bands like Milk Buttons, Cowbird and -perhaps his best known- Big Dead. All of those outfits have fused together sounds from the arty, serious end of the spectrum: from prog-rock through to jazz and often making a significant amount of noise in the process. In that regard, you might be caught off guard when you hear the beginning of his solo, ambient work, Iceberg, with all of its lilting sounds and soft-focus production. It surely won’t take long before you realise this is still your guy, but there’s a lasting, uncanny quality as Bower’s new work lingers between what you know and something markedly different.

It should sound familiar, Bower employs his typical multi-instrumentalism, moving between piano, guitar and electronics and his habitual fondness for collaboration, here with string players Flora Wong and Briony Lutrell, which serves to make his latest work a little bit distinct from a lot of the ambient music out there. The use of traditional, analogue instruments probably encourages Bower’s presser when it shoots for the stars, describing the approach as Radiohead meets Stockhausen. Clearly that doesn’t reference any ambient musicians, but as I said, this isn’t exactly what you’re expecting. For instance, the unfolding gentleness of Here And Hereafter, layering piano and electronics and strings, is deceptive: there’s a rhythmic complexity undulating through its slow crescendo and heaving waves, one that’s easy to miss if you don’t really pay attention. This is repeated, though with more sudden contrast, on The Slow Return Of Fire. As per the title, that one slowly shrugs off the chill in favour of a roar of fiery distortion. After a pensive interlude, this is given full expression on the album’s title track, which is less an ice floe than some kind of volcanic eruption, reminiscent of Ben Frost; if Bower isn’t going to give us ambient influences I guess I’ll do it myself.

Ten minute album centrepiece, Aeroplane, shimmers and sparkles with all of those instrumental parts more hidden beneath the haze than ever before. Every now and then, especially as the track progresses, sweet stabs of string and synth shoot up out of the atmosphere in a very Vangelis fashion. It can, on the record as a whole, be a little difficult to hear the detail of the compositional work, with the production pall that’s thrown over the music by both Bower and Rafael Anton Irrisari, whose mastering imparts a quality similar to his own work. It doesn’t really matter, the instruments and everything they do are, in the end, not here to be virtuosic in their own right -even on a sweet string vignette like the poignant closer, Your Precious Beating Heart- they’re made to serve the greater ambient tapestry.

That’s the success of this record. Bower describes it as the culmination of the different parts of his musical personality, but it isn’t prog rock and it isn’t experimental classical music. Iceberg is like ambient music created collage-style, taking those things you know and sublimating them. Soft, indistinct beauty and occasional thunderheads of violence, coalesce out of the particles of what was, in impressionistic, vaporous clouds of sound.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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