VARIOUS ARTISTS

POP AMBIENT 2014 (Kompakt)

16/20

The new year, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, always  fleshes out it’s hungover husk with a whiff of the inevitable: we’ll give the gym up by the 17th, we won’t quit smoking or being a prick on the internet and Kompakt will serve up another platter of tastefully utopian rambles through the murk of that which we know as ambient. The Cologne label know, after twenty years of nonstop magnificently melancholy big room tech-house stompers, that sometimes you’ve go to drag yourself out of the dark and stumble home, roll a desultory single skin and stay on the sofa for as long as we can before succumbing to sweaty half sleep in broad daylight and the aches that follow. That’s where the Pop Ambient compilations come in.

As usual, the big guns appear – Ulf Lohman’s Sicht sets the scene with its yearning chasms of wordless voices beaming themselves deep into space, deep into the mind, Thomas Fehlmann’s Treatment is an aptly named dose of new age tinkles and glitchy tones, Mikkel Metal explore something akin to Ry Cooder wandering round the desert on a dose of some horrible hallucegenic legal high on ‘Patience’, hell, they even give us the dream team of Wolfgang Voigt, under his Gas alias, remixing The Field, which is as great as you imagine – and a few new kids in the first turn up too. Of these, Simon Scott impresses most on his sublimely Gas-sy Fur Betty.

Look, it’s a Pop Ambient compilation. We all know what it’s going to sound like. We all know it should be great. Luckily, it is.

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Words: Josh Baines