The wonderful ambient blog Hypnagogue has a great review of Slow Dancing Society’s fifth release, Lanterna Magica. Here’s an excerpt:

“Sullivan’s cool pizzicato playing, like rain drops on guitar strings, forms the base of several tracks. “A Few Moments”  finds it gracefully sharing space with gossamer pads, light touches of piano, and echoing rimshot-style percussion …. There’s a distinct soul-baring quality at work, like Sullivan is confiding in you in a somewhat hesitant way–he has to get what’s inside out, but it comes in deliberately spaced moments.”

As always, Lanterna Magica and the rest of Slow Dancing Society’s catalog is available at the Hidden Shoal Store.

“Any artist five albums into a particular project might start getting restless and be tempted to change things up. But often doing so betrays the fundamental integrity of said project and the move ends up being a diminishment rather than enhancement. In that regard, it’s pleasing to discover that Drew Sullivan hasn’t dramatically altered his Slow Dancing Society sound on Laterna Magica but instead given us fifty more minutes of the lustrous ambient music that has performed a slow dazzle on listeners since the project’s 2006 inception. Track titles alone (e.g., “After the Twilight Takes Us,” “I’ll See You in Time”) indicate that the Washington-based soundsculptor’s music is still powerfully suffused with nostalgia and longing, and the album’s refined material bears that out in forceful manner.

It’s uniformly slow-moving, naturally, which allows the listener to all the more easily savour the soothing effects of the electric guitar and piano textures and crystalline synthesizer washes that inhabit a typical Slow Dancing Society setting. With the music breathing so unhurriedly, the listener finds his/her own inner state gradually attuning itself to the album’s languorous electronic rhythms. An entrancing swirl of piano, synthesizer, and guitar patterns, “I’ll See You in Time” is representative of the album’s style. No small number of lovely touches emerge, such as the chiming guitar figures that grace “Gardens & Graves” and “A Slow Parade of Wind” and imbue them with such a wistful quality.

There are passages where the music swells to an intense pitch, in particular during the tropical haze of “There’s a Place For Us” and the at-times ominous “I’ll Leave a Light On,” and “Pieces of Your Presence” exudes an uncharacteristic urgency in its sequencer-like patterns. A speaking voice also surfaces in a few tracks to ensure that the album doesn’t flirt too much with homogeneity, but, generally speaking, Sullivan stays the course and hews closely to his carefully calibrated Slow Dancing Society style. In simplest terms, Laterna Magica makes for a nuanced addition to Sullivan’s slow-building body of work.”

- Textura

“I’m crossing a bridge on a cloudy morning.  It looks like it might rain.  People are running, God knows from what or where to, a slow dancing society unfolds in plain sight every second, and the music of Drew Sullivan seems to be made to draw our attention to the beauty or ugliness (which is equally fascinating and educational) of this world.  Ambient music has in many cases been used as the soundtrack to sunsets, strange color formations in the sky and other obscure moments of abstract beauty that seem to occur more often than we are capable of noticing them.  For an artist such as Slow Dancing Society, originating from the land of rain (the state of Washington), the anticipation of a shower every time the sun is hidden becomes an inspiration, and leads to a more stoic approach to life and art, as well as a greater appreciation of the times we tend to describe as good (a metaphor for which can be the times when the sun is shining).

Sullivan, has developed into a shaman of sound, whose ambient (mostly guitar) music that has in some cases drawn comparisons to Hammock, has begun to deviate towards a quieter, more personal approach.  Laterna Magica is a more esoteric work than its predecessors, even if the differences from albums such as The Slow and Steady Winter or The Sounds of Lights When Dim may not be noticed at first.  The music seems to be getting more abstract, and the emotional outbreaks of tracks such as the lovely “February Sun” from the fabulous The Slow and Steady Winter, less frequent.  The melodies seem to be frozen in time, telling us stories of love, pain or loss in slow-motion, and emphasizing their universalness.  Faint hints of a beat here and there serve as a reminder that we are parts of an enormous machine, and we must be aware at all times of the dangers surrounding us.  Droney atmospheric sounds led by a minimal guitar or piano however soon deliver us to the dreamlike state, that reveals the true meaning of our existence, which cannot be described in words.

Revisiting the first paragraph, I realize that I am describing a personal experience, whose meaning became clearer to me while listening to this album, and may have nothing to do with the artist’s vision.  But the ability to make its listeners project and find meaning in their own experience is in itself a victory and music such as this can certainly have that effect. (John Kontos)“

-A Closer Listen

“Slow Dancing Society, on the other hand, may be the most loveable of Hidden Shoals’ roster. Built around chiming, delayed guitars, Drew Sullivan´s music glows and radiates more wattage than most ambient. Sulllivan has a consistent, very personal address. His previous effort Under the Sodium Lights was one great big, dreamily seductive love letter. Lanterna Magica is an album of specific farewells, if the fact that half the ten tracks contain personal pronouns in their titles is any indication. It is light, almost Californian romance for “A Few Moments,” marred by the unfortunate idea of frankensteining a hermaphroditic spoken-word stanza at the very end. But that small flaw is easily outshone by magical moments like “Gardens and Graves” and “I’ll See You in Time,” wispy things that graze up against a kind of ambient folk. Unprepossessing, only waved at with effects, Sullivan’s Laterna Magica is far easier to embrace than the more challenging Mehr, but that doesn’t make it any less well-crafted. Although the label chose “I’ll Leave a Light On” as lead-in single, I would have gone with “A Slow Parade of Wind.” And even though it is an emotionally-based album, Sullivan takes time for a genuine think-piece with “There’s a Place for Us.” “

-Igloo Magazine