Excerpt: “Amazing… Willenbring’s got this quality of creating perfect moods and clever atmospheres. The dreamscapes, or musical paintings created by Wes Willenbring are truly spellbinding beauties. The almost perfect soundtrack to long, cold, dark winter nights. Close, But Not Too Close is ghost music. At least it’s a little bit haunted.”
Excerpt: “Each piece is built on Willenbring’s very calm playing on guitar and piano, but these more tactile melodic elements soon evaporate into rising tides of thick, gentle, sometimes atonal drones. It’s quite like discovering you’re on a very small boat that someone has pushed out to sea while you were napping. Whichever song is playing, you’ll awake to a new, intriguing and oddly beautiful landscape that’s both familiar and just slightly unusual. And you can’t stop looking at it. Put Somewhere, Someone Else on repeat, sit in the dark—or, more appropriately, in the light of single flickering candle—and just allow Willenbring to take you along for the ride. Start to finish, this suite of minimalist tone-poems will not only give you reason to think, it will give you many reasons to listen again.”
Excerpt: “‘Close, But Not Too Close’ sees Willenbring thicken the sound, enriching the instrumentation used, for example the classic fingerpicking of “The Burrow” and the organ that characterizes the initial “I’m Looking Forward To Your Funeral.” [The album embraces] evanescent melodies and restless emotional texture. A good confirmation of a talented artist”
Hidden Shoal Recordings is proud to announce the release of the first single taken from the eagerly awaited sophomore album by American ambient craftsman Wes Willenbring.
‘Oh, Most’ sees Willenbring develop on the gorgeous palette of tones explored on his debut album Somewhere Someone Else. The track is submerged in icy washes of guitar, under which piano and bass meet in a rhythmic valium struggle. As with Willenbring’s best work ‘Oh, Most’ is all about time in both its broadest and most discrete sense. There is a deliberation present in its composition that makes for a level of engagement far beyond any easy notion of ambient music.
“Absolutely gorgeous. Dreamy dark meandering melancholia for fans of Stars Of The Lid, Eluvium, Dead Texan, Tim Hecker, Godspeed and other purveyors of darkly dramatic, abstract moody minimalism” – Aquarius Records on Somewhere Someone Else
‘Oh, Most’ is taken from the upcoming Wes Willenbring eight-song opus Close, But Not Too Close. The track is available for free download from the Hidden Shoal Store until the official CD release of Close, But Not Too Close on November 12th, 2009. Fans will be able to get an early taste of the album when it is digitally pre-released on October 20th.
Read a full press release here.
Wes Willenbring – Oh, Most Wes Willenbring – Oh, Most
