- Primitive Motion is a Brisbane based duo who first combined to produce sonic landscapes around seven years ago. Their third full-length album is called House in the Wave, released through the Bedroom Suck label.
I don’t know when “ambient” was first used as a genre description – probably at least forty years ago – but it’s hard to think of a recording which better fits this label. It’s a collection of dreamy, meditative, relaxing tunes, where the changes in tone and feel happen are as hard to perceive as the change from mist to cloud.
These are stripped back songs – a wafting mixture of mostly piano, vocals and saxophone; sometimes with even less in the mix, and sometimes with a little bit more added, deliberately or by way of incidental sounds like birdcalls and rain.
The tunes were recorded in a home studio, with sax player Sandra Seelig reportedly using an old fashioned way of fading the volume in and out – namely walking from one room to another while playing.
This recording certainly won’t get you up and dancing, but it will soothe your recovery from a bout of doing just that. Or it might even relax your synapses to the stage where your inner eye sees past the frenetic distractions of daily existence and slowly seeps into a deeper state.
If ambient music just puts you to sleep, this recording will at least ensure that your sleep is full of pleasant dreams. But if you’re the type that enjoys the beauty of slowly discovering aural landscapes unfolding in front of you, then this is one recording you should explore.
The first single from the album, called Feed the Signals, is a good representation of what you can expect to hear. It’s a lilting, caressing interplay of simple sounds floating as gently and sometimes erratically as a butterfly’s flight path. Primitive Motion’s House in the Wave provides songs stripped bare of pretension – and of unnecessary instrumentation.
- Andrew Bartlett.