Ambient Red Washes image to come

Larry Kucharz and his International Audiochrome label have worked on the periphery of electronic music for many years. A quick look at his website reveals release after release of varied electronic texture-driven works, as well as forays into music with techno and IDM characteristics. Kucharz is prolific--in the time it has taken me to review Ambient Blue Washes, the Ambient Red Washes album has been released. It's thus appropriate that I should review both titles at once, as the material on each release compliments the other quite well.

Both Ambient Blue Washes and Ambient Red Washes are studies in color through sound. These compositions can be taken as sonic Mark Rothko paintings; pure washes of ambient drift. This theme is beautifully rendered as soft, subtly shifting textures, often resembling Eno's Music for Airports in their gentle meandering mien, wandering through the edges of the listener's perception. Each of the tracks on Ambient Blue Washes are numbered (as with many of Rothko's paintings), allowing the listener to place his or her own meanings to the particular track. This also, to some degree, seems to be an artistic choice via Rothko on the part of Kucharz: the titles describe nothing. As Rothko himself stated, "silence is so accurate"; it's clear Kucharz does not wish to confine his musical pieces by using titles to guide the listener’s imagination.

Blue Washes is the more difficult of the duo, though it begins with a relaxing suite of contrasting textures. If this represents the color blue, then it is most assuredly a light blue resembling the color of sky or a shallow pool of water reflecting said sky. The second track features more pointilist and archly mechanical sounds, arranged carefully around moments of silence. Kucharz's use of silence as "sound" is particularly intriguing here, as the sonic elements seem more vibrant when placed alongside "non-sound." Track four has a more symphonic and shimmering gleam, as angelic tones vibrate with deep crystalline blue colors. Somewhat similar to Thom Brennan's recent Satori, this is some very fine bliss-out material, if a little static over eleven minutes. Track five is also a deep blue color, but this time featuring overlapping drones that resemble Piet Mondrian's painted constructions of lines. Indeed, in this way, the work of Kucharz often seems more an intellectual exercise than an evocative sound canvas. I found that the majority of tracks on Ambient Blue Washes were studies in sound that drifted too much in the periphery and did not command my attention readily. Many of the tracks are more ignorable than interesting (to coin Eno's phrase), though to some degree this is in keeping with Kucharz's implied concept of sound as painting. One may just as readily choose to ignore the painting for months, focusing upon it infrequently at best. Conceptually this thought is interesting, but, logically, it does not make for music played often. In some way, by being so subtle it seems that the majority of Ambient Blue Washes is simply not there at all.

Ambient Red Washes, on the other hand, commands the attention from the first few seconds of play. The concept is the same, but with Red Washes I find the pieces to be more vibrant and emotional. "Red Wash no. 2" opens the album with a computer-choral piece, emotionally charged, bittersweet and romantic at once. The Ambient Red Washes here are subtle (in keeping with its predecessor), with interlocking "voices" always within the listener's grasp. "Red Wash no. 4" is similarly constructed but with an underlying "tech bleep" (that matches the corresponding track two from Ambient Blue Washes to some degree). The "Red Washes" on Ambient Red Washes are combined with tracks from 1993 which are in a similar style. Track three, "1993 no. 10," is a number of soft overlaid drones. The “1993” tracks often resemble a number of parallel lines; continuing on toward the vanishing point, some lines reaching that far into the distance, others ceasing before then. The pieces on Ambient Red Washes are often like slices of infinite music, as if they had been excerpted from some eternally iterating musical program. The sonic palette does not shift remarkably on Red Washes, instead maintaining a sense of variations on similar themes. While this lends a flavor of sameness on all of the tracks, I found the elements to be pleasing, relaxing, and often breathtaking. There is some clinical coldness present in Ambient Blue Washes that made the tracks appear fairly sterile--this sterility is not present on Ambient Red Washes, making for an always interesting listen. Both albums clock in at over seventy minutes, but Red Washes has a lightness to it that belies its length, something that the more ponderously vague Blue Washes tends to suffer from: the tracks are more forgettable on the latter, even if they are sonically more adventurous. I find Ambient Red Washes to be extremely listenable. I’ve played it frequently during a wide variety of activities; sleep, reading, staring out my office windows. It's ambient in the most powerful sense: music for your own personal environments.

Larry Kucharz has crafted some of the most intellectually stimulating recent ambient works I've had the pleasure to hear. For the neophyte, I unreservedly recommend going for Ambient Red Washes first. Its perfumed tones are intoxicating, sacrificing none of the conceptual imagery intended by the artist. Blue Washes is less pleasing to these ears, ringing as more of a concept that sounds better on "canvas" than it does during real life execution. Like the best of abstract art, Kucharz's two recent sets of ambient “washes” leave the interpretation to the listener.

Visit Kucharz's appropriately minimalist site.

since July 15, 2003