Today’s piece of freely available music is by British ambient musician Daniel W J Mackenzie, aka (via some partial name reversing) Ekca Liena. November in Flight was originally released over a decade-and-a-half ago, on a bonus CD included in Mackenzie’s 2011 album Slow Music For Rapid Eye Movement. It’s a 22-minute piece created using “improvised recordings captured on some cold nights in Brighton, England, November 2008”.
The field recordings aren’t used so much for their details as for their ability to act as a noise-based counterpoint to the other primary element in the piece, slowly moving chords and pitches. November in Flight is a drone piece; this is established just over a minute in, and while the pitch elements are ultimately stronger than the field recordings, they nonetheless often sound attenuated or gently distorted in this context. Until around six minutes in, that is, when a short repeating melodic phrase resounds like a bright light; there’s still a slight perception of distortion but less from the noisy surroundings (which by now are minimal) than due to its own intensity. The music, and us with it, are held in the transfixing grip of this sequence; it again puts the lie to the fallacy that ambient is all about gentle prettiness – this should be played as loud as you can take.
Mackenzie allows more traces of field recordings to circulate as the piece continues, surrounding this incandescent centre with a halo of bristling noise that gives its border a slightly harder edge. It’s a sign of things to come, and in due course the noise surges forward like a shimmering wall of abrasion wiping almost all pitch focus away. November in Flight turns out to be something of a diptych, passing from intense melodic clarity, into a ferocious, chaotic noisescape, where the drone is all but (yet never entirely) lost. Again, this should be played as loud as you can face, as it’s no less glorious in its radiance. Only in the closing minutes does Mackenzie ease off, causing the noise to recede and thereby expose pitches moving within. Smaller shining notes come forward, and at the very end a guitar almost manages to materialise.
November in Flight is available as a free download via Bandcamp.
I just found this am really pleased to see this old music is still being discovered, but is also worthy of analysis and sharing. I love this one, the first thing I made when I relocated to Brighton, which effectively steered the direction of my adult life. Thank you.