Track Listing:

1. Glacial Danube (06:08)

2. Thin Light (06:13)

3. A Darkness of Snow (06:51)

4. Horizon discrete (05:36)

5. Ice Whispers (34:18)

Label: Glacial Movements

Ambient Isolationism.

CD. Ltd Edition Digipack.

Mixed and composed by Rapoon (Robin Storey), July 2007

Cover Photo A cold by the sea by Bjarne Riesto

Graphic solution and artwork by Alessandra Clini

One of the predicted swings in the weather due to global warming is paradoxically a new ice age which could envelope Europe. Time Frost is music based upon this concept and uses tiny fragments of music from an iconic European composition, Johann Strauss's Blue Danube. I imagined that tiny pieces of former cultures survived locked in the ice and waiting for future archaeologists to discover and interpret them.I used vinyl lock grooves of the Blue Danube (from the 1968 MGM recording for the film soundtrack 2001 ) These formed the starting points for the five compositions in Time Frost which were then manipulated and added to and re-arranged into new compositions. Time Frost is an imaginary recording of the mutational process of sound locked into ice and transformed over millenia. Like ghosts of music trapped in an evershifting perma frost.

Robin Storey, August 2007

Reviews:          

         

 

RAPOON Time Frost (Glacial Movements)

Robin Storey, aka Rapoon, has always been an industrious fellow, what with another handful of releases spread out over differing labels throughout 2007. His debut on Italian newie Glacial Movements, Time Frost, finds him ever-so-slightly deviating from his aural signature; although his is a catalog that isn’t without its detours (say, Cold War Drum ‘n’ Bass, for instance), Storey’s carved out such an acute niche for himself that he’s practically his own genre. Time Frost is an ode to frozen isolationism, Storey utilizing snatches of Strauss’s Blue Danube as the basis for his demonstrative loops, of which he then twists, corkscrews, and otherwise manipulates into some pretty spellbinding shapes. Place this album right next to Wolfgang Voigt’s various Gas projects of the 90s, and sensorialism becomes an autonomic function. In general, Storey’s expertise lies in mapping out and navigating a mood; here, it’s lucid dreaming or various psycho geographic states, organizing a series of revolving faux-crescendos that conceal latent power. Horizon Discrete makes the bite of wind chill a tangible presence coating the speaker fabric, and the softly cooing droneblitzes of Thin Light circulate vividly enough to pierce the darkness, but it’s on the half-hour-plus Ice Whispers where Storey’s seemingly tiny sounds are writ large: massed chorales of sound that surge, billow, hover, and enshroud the ear in a veritable tour de force of symphonic beauty. A high water mark in the Rapoon oeuvre, and one of Storey’s best recent recordings. DARREN BERGSTEIN, Signal to Noise Magazine, Issue #49, Circuit Breakers column (Erectile Dysfunction)www.signaltonoisemagazine.com)

RAPOON Time Frost new review @TOKAFY

Body: http://www.tokafi.com/newsitems/cd-feature-rapoon-time-frost

Strong images in a musical world of loneliness: Makes its proximity to the visual arts all apparent.

Robin Storey mainly regards his work as „soundtracks. Hardly ever has this become as obvious as on this occasion. Admittedly, he has included a continuous narrative on previous albums, referenced his music to Twin Peaks and Lynch and seen his work included in documentaries. And yet, all of these efforts covered only partial aspects of a fully fledged soundtrack. So, while „Time Frost still does not accompany any actual movie, the fact that it follows a virtual script and bases on the score of an all time cinematic classic makes its proximity to the visual arts all apparent.

The outline of the story behind the album is something of a still, a thought or a snow-covered slide. Guided by meteorological predictions of a new ice age in Europe, Storey conjures up a vision of endless white plains covering the green fields of Ireland, of huge icicles hanging from the Tour d'Eiffel, of meandering glacial formations encapsulating the epicentres of western civilisation in the urban conglomerates of the big metropoles. He dreams of memories and music frozen in the cold, waiting to be rediscovered by generations of future scientist. What will they make of these fossilised artefacts? What would they feel when digging up a piece like Strauss' „The Blue Danube?

These are the questions at the heart of „Time Frost and it is important to keep them in mind, because Robin Storey adjusts his techniques to the red thread of this imaginary situation. For sample material, he uses snippets from the Strauss' rendition taken from the soundtrack to Kubrick's „2001. In accordance with the idea of these musical memories slumbering in the permafrost, he imagines them as running through repetitive cycles and of developing a consciousness in a state between life and death by looping themselves in perpetual motion. Everything on this album is subsequently self-referential, except its initial quote. The first twenty minutes even consist of nothing but variations on a theme composed of a major second, running through filter modulations and melting with slightly out of phase echoes of itself.

As far as musical minimalism goes, the album certainly represents one of the more extreme cases of the past months. Still, there is always something going on. Storey morphs his theme continuously, lends a rhythmical component to it on „A Darkness of Snow and a pulse less groove on „Thin Light, changing its functionality from Leitmotiv to introduction and conclusion in the over half an hour long acme „Ice Whispers. In the body of the latter track, he smears out the formants of the tiny phrase to thick, clustered drones, which hover on the polar sky statically and majestically. Against all expectations, with each cycle its original message gets lost more and more in an opaque mist of meanings. Storey does not use repetition to create recogntion and stay locked in the past – he uses it to forge a new identity and to focus on the present.

And then, of course, the thematic concentration also destilles all emotions into a single, all-encompassing mood of solitude and isolation. As the temperature drops, the senses switch to a dormant mode, in which all outward movement is substituted by the slow charging of chemical impulses in the brain. The eyes close and pictures float by like yellowed photographs drifting on a sea of blackness. Strong images in a musical world of loneliness – Robin Storey has written a soundtrack which needs no movie to be visual.

By Tobias Fischer

Gothtronic:

This is already the third release on the small Italian label Glacial Movements and they just don't stop being amazing. After the highly recommended sampler Cryosphere and the impressive Morketid by label-owner Netherworld it is time for Robin Storey, a.k.a. Rapoon to come up with enough icecold ambience to freeze your stereo.

Yes, stereo, because the music on 'Time Frost' is way to intrusive to play in the background while you're driving a car or bicycle. This stuff - as with most deep dark ambient or drones - should be played on a good volume while you're sitting on the couch or in your favourite chair, reading a book or just listening to the tunes.

Rapoon's trademark is already known to most of you - slow delays where ambience or rhythmic structures are guided into a soundscape - and on 'Time Frost' it is no different. But every time Mr. Storey seems to be able to get into a perspective where it still sounds progressive and unlike any work before.

'Time Frost' is more minimal then other Rapoon releases which subscribes the loneliness and nothingness of the arctic atmospheres laid out by the Glacial Movements label. The four shorter tracks which open the CD are complemented with a long, almost 35 minute opus magnus which is already worth buying this CD.

Sooo, what's next? I want more!

Band: Rapoon(int)

Label: Glacial Movements

Genre: ambient (ambient / soundscapes / ritual / drones)

Type: cd

Grade: 8

Review by: Bauke

Rapoon - TIME FROST - Glacial Movements Records - 2007

Rapoon: 'Time Frost' (Glacial Movements) Is a conceptual ambient, drift-work based on the idea of the effects of global warming and the presupposition that a new ice age is due to envelop Europe. Made up from locked grooves sourced from a vinyl copy of Johan Strauss's 'Blue Danube', these are then processed to build up a series of undulating waves, washes and orchestral sounding sweeps of sound and tones. Fans of Infraction will warm to arctic loops, deep tonal utterances, oceanic wandering and the imitation of weather systems. I'm not sure if the production of a CD like this contributes to Global Warming (it probably does!), but at least it highlights the phenomenon in a rich and evocative way.

NORMAN RECORDS

Robin Storey has been making music as Rapoon since 1992 but his musical endeavors actually started in 1979 as one of the founding members of Zoviet France. As revealed in the liner notes, the underlying concept behind the music of Time Frost is the possibility of a new ice age engulfing Europe in the future as an ironic consequence of global warming. The five compositions on Time Frost use minute samples of sound from Johann Strauss’s waltz An der Schönen Blauen Donau more commonly referred to as Blue Danube . Storey imagined that tiny pieces of a former culture survived locked in the ice and waiting for future archeologists to discover and interpret them. Time Frost consists of five movements. The first four have durations falling between five to seven minutes while the fifth spans nearly thirty-five minutes in length. There’s a common motif of repetition found within all of the movements as looped segments of orchestral samples pan back and forth, and, in all but the fourth movement, there’s a smooth, translucent ambiance kept in the forefront throughout. While the first two movements Glacial Danube and Thin Light are gently flowing layered pieces of lightly processed cyclic orchestral fragments and soothing tones and timbres, the paradoxically titled A Darkness of Snow initiates a subtle descent into more shadowy ambiances with deeper tones, coarser textures, and more processing. The arrival of Horizon Discrete marks a change in direction as the orchestral sounds move to the background overtaken slightly by a persistent, hazy noise that cycles in and out in the foreground, and a more opaque, discordant atmosphere slowly unfolds. The first four minutes of Ice Whispers reclaims the calm, translucent orchestral ambiance of the first two movements, but then abruptly embarks on a lengthy, dense, downward spiral into darkness and isolation full of scratchy noise, resonating drones, and deep rumblings (think of his earlier ambient-industrial works) before returning to the orchestral musings of its beginnings. Time Frost shows a different to side to Robin Storey’s numerous artistic endeavors in electronic/experimental music, and is an excellent third release for the Glacial Movements label.

EARLABS

This is a new album of prolific artist Rapoon aka Robin Storey who under this moniker he has released a large discography since 1992, although his background musical routes come as a member of the enigmatic English trio Zoviet France in 1979.

‘Time Frost’ is released in a new Roman label which is run by Alessandro Tedeschi aka Netherworld (who also released on Glacial Movements his album untitled ‘Morketid’).

This album was composed and mixed on July of this year and its music it is based on a next one was glacial, due paradoxically by the weather shifts produced by the global warming.

Robin Storey in my opinion from its last discs more is focused in the orchestral atmospheres that those with Arab influence.

On ‘Time Frost’ loops comprise fragments of the composition ‘Blue Danube’ of JohannStrauss and ambient keyboard lines. The pieces of ‘Blue Danube’ were the started point for 5 compositions which were manipulated and added to and re-arranged Storey into new pieces.

‘Global Danube’ which opens the album has a new version with ‘Ice Whispers’ but with a more expansive version and together with ‘Horizon Discrete’ explores the darkest spaces, in as much ‘Thin Light’ and ‘A Darkness of Show’ that in spite of its title offers a more hopeful feeling.

LOOP

Nine Review

‘Time Frost’ by Rapoon (aka Robin Storey) is the third release from the Italian based, Glacial Movements record label who specialise in putting out music that documents images such as the boreal dawn that shines upon silent white valleys in the Great Northern lands. ‘Time Frost’ is a limited edition of 750 and features nearly 60 minutes of music spread across 5 movements.

The album is based upon the concept of a new ice-age which could envelope Europe, and uses tiny fragments of Johann Stauss’s ‘Blue Danube’ as starting points for the five compositions. The opener, ‘Glacial Danube’ is a sonically uplifting journey into an ethereal void due to its angelic audio-tones which ooze effortlessly above subtle nuances of sub-drone and sonic crackle. ‘Thin Light’ starts with a slightly more recognizable piece of the original source material but slowly warps into a thick and foreboding slice of dark-ambience which documents the ebb and flow of glacial–interglacial periods within an ice age. ‘A Darkness of Snow’ is a warm and bubbly piece featuring a fizzy and pulsating tone which interplays with contrasting layers of drone to create an engaging sonic-journey akin to discovering a ‘geothermal hot spring’ in a ice-laden wasteland. ‘Horizon Discrete’ is a far more bleak and inhospitable track which conjures up images of blustery winter winds over deep, throbbing droneage. The final piece, ‘Ice Whispers’ weights in at a mighty 34minutes and brings a number of aforementioned trends into play. It is defiantly the darkest and densest track on the album and shifts across the vast sub-polar spectrum from ‘effervescent scrapes of micro-electronica over temperate harmonic effects’ to Sunn 0-esque pitch-black deep-space ambience and back to desolate and baron icescapes. Towards the end there is some great ‘disorientating’ effects made by switching signals from left to right and one only wishes that this was an effect that was carried throughout the album.

Rapoon describes the sound of ‘Time Frost’ as an imaginary recording of the mutational process of sound locked into ice and transformed over millenia. Like ghosts of music trapped in an evershifting permafrost. This is a very accurate and apt description of the album although there is much warmth portrayed by the sound. The crystallized microtones, aquatic drones and shimmering sounds show that there is life behind the frost, and this ideology is perfectly summed up by the cover art. Such an interplay between the deep-freeze and the fragile warmth makes ‘Time Frost’ a captivating and engaging piece of sound that will transform your listening area into a distant place, far removed from the hustle and bustle of the world outside. All in all, ‘Time Frost’ is an icey yet warmly produced, slow-motion deep-thaw audio documentation of Glacial mega-trends and Isostatic depression.

EXPERIMUSIC.COM

For me Time Frost is the first fully realized release from the Glacial Movements label that fulfils the labels remit of supplying ambience and sound work that conjures up vast frozen deserts, shifting ice continents and the loneliness and beauty of arctic climes.

The album uses tiny elements from an iconic European classical composition Johan Strauss’s Blue Danube and the resulting 5 tracks start off sounding like a less timeworn and more lush William Basinski compositions made from looped and stuck string elements that really capture the awe inspiring feeling of sailing over vast white frozen dunes of a snow desert, or swooping & diving into mile deep ice cannons. As the album progress the tracks slowly become more blown by freezing winds and seemly cracked by lying in arctic climate too long- their melodic loops less defined and the tones seem to become more muffled and stretched out. It also seems to hint at a darker quality as if the sun setting on freezing landscapes. By the last track ice whispers, the longest here at near on 35 minutes - the arctic wind and deep stretched-out tones have all but replaced the melodic, lush elements- the drone textures still just hovering with melodic touches, but with now with a much darker hues. The track really conjures up such a tangible feeling of solitude, chilling wonder and vastness of iced and frozen land mass.

Certainly the best thing this relatively new label has released thus far & one of the ambient highlights of this year.

MUSIQUE MACHINE

Time Frost by Rapoon, an alias of one-time zoviet* france member (and co-founder) Robin Storey, deviates to some degree from the two prior Glacial Movements releases, Netherworld's Morketid and the Cryosphere compilation. In place of desolate, frozen tundra, we get celestial formations that drift through the empyrean in a beatific style that could make Marsen Jules jealous. Storey used tiny fragments of The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss (specifically, vinyl locked grooves lifted from the version included on the 1968 2001 soundtrack) as starting points which he then manipulated and re-arranged to form the hour-long disc's five settings. Though Rapoon 's material may sound sonically different from his label predecessors (during the album's first half in particular), conceptually the release stays true to the label's ‘glacial and isolationist ambient' vision: Time Frost aurally documents the frozen preservation of cultural fragments during a new ice age and their eventual discovery and interpretation by future archaeologists.

In Glacial Danube, swooping choir-like tones pan from side to side amidst static and crackle, while immense waves of hazy strings swirl and shudder during the Gas-like Thin Light. Needless to say, such pieces, as effective as they may be, are dwarfed by the colossus Ice Whispers which spreads its glacial wings for thirty-four minutes. The piece's dark industrial-ambient style brings Time Frost closer in spirit to the label's signature style: winds howl, vaporous clouds billow, chains rattle, and sweeping spectral tones rise from subterranean chambers and cast vast shadows, plunging the terrain into near-darkness. As it advances towards its end, its epic quality diminishes, and the panning tones and crackle of Glacial Danube reappear, bestowing upon the release a satisfying unity. Time Frost is about as accomplished a piece of dark ambient as one might hope to find, something that, in itself, shouldn't surprise too much, given Storey's CV.

TEXTURA

Robin Storey refers to his work as soundtracks, and this programmatic aspect is as apparent as ever on Time Frost. Admittedly, its visual subject/object is entirely conceptual, playing in each listener’s head-cinema, but it does follow a Storey-ed script. His credentials as a sonorous screen-player are well-established, largely articulated in an esoteric netherworld of ritual/ethno ambient. The Rapoon project is one of some longevity, established in 1992, before which Storey was leading light in the dark ambient drones and industrial (m)alchemics of the :zoviet*france: collective, intrepid ethno-sonographers and sowers in the seeding bed of what was to grow into the thriving (post-) industrial ambient underground of the 90s. But back to concept...

Time Frost envisages the dystopian possibility of a new global warming-induced Ice Age enveloping Europe. Storey himself trails it as ...an imaginary recording of the mutational process of sound locked into ice and transformed over millenia. This is mediated through slivers of sections of sound sliced from Strauss’s Blue Danube being choreographed into mutant motion. Fragments rent from one of our civilisation’s more iconic cultural artefacts lie in suspension, like ice-bound sonic fossils awaiting unearthing and interpretation by future archaeologists. But their inbetween glacier days are not cast in shadow’s sleep, but instead enter into a looping limbo of altered and altering states.

Rapoon has always been about loops and a certain trance-like reiteration, and Storey is not about to make radical shifts in compositional strategies. The new is in the source sounds and how they are manipulated and emplaced into conceptual frame. Segments of orchestral samples, variously treated, are hard panned back and forth across the sound stage to create the luminous fluid tableaux of initial movements, Glacial Danube and Thin Light, with a lighter shade of processing issuing in transparent icy timbres. These are essentially thematic variants run through filter modulations, arcing across their phase shifting replicas. The advent of A Darkness of Snow signals a gradual descent into more tenebrous terrain, streaked with more tonal grit and grime. The real heavyweight, though, is 34-minute centre/endpiece Ice Whispers. It first revisits the relative serenity of the early episodes, but then Storey’s material, always returning, protean, continously reflecting back on itself and shapeshifting, embarks on a sudden precipitous plunge. The listener is pulled down into a dark vortex in which the contours of the keynote phrase are thickly smudged into a whirling drone cloud teeming with treble scratch and bass rumble before returning, re-attenuated, to base, its keynote theme twirling above the frost-bound tundra. A journey, then, through cycles spun and message manipulated into meaning mist, which each must navigate by colour.

FURTHERNOISE

The very latest release from this Italian cold ambient label is from the UK’s Rapoon, otherwise known as Robin Storey, ex member of legendary northern ‘ambient industrialists’ Zoviet France. Time Frost is centred around two ideas: one, in an apparent paradox, is that the present threat of global warming will not result in a general warming of the earth but instead plunge us back into an ice age (it goes something like this I believe but any climatologists out there please feel free to jump in and correct me... it has something to do with the observed fact that over the last couple of decades atmospheric temperatures have cooled and also that meltwater from the Greenland icesheet is changing salinity levels in the ocean and disrupting the flow of currents that help to keep the northern hemisphere ice-free by releasing heat... so if those currents can’t do their job properly then there’s the possibility we may yet be covered by miles-thick ice sometime in the next tens of thousands of years....); and two, taking tiny fragments of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube and subjecting them to manipulation, stretching and looping with the idea being that each fragment represents a surviving piece of a former civilisation locked in a future sea of ice and consequently being discovered and interpreted by archaeologists. It is interesting how something as famous as Strauss’s signature waltz can be rendered unrecognisable and unintelligible in such a way and yet still retain a strong sense of icy beauty and vitality whilst simultaneously creating a sonic backdrop to beautiful yet alluringly dangerous landscapes. Thin Light is an eternally stately waltz swirling its way through the snowfall, the dancers appearing and disappearing through gaps in the curtain of flakes whilst A Darkness of Snow is the heavy crush of white that inevitably envelops all that which slows its step and finally stops it, the cold sapping the strength and the consciousness drifting off into blessed oblivion. The peril continues to stalk in Horizon Discrete, an edgy tension accompanied by heavy exhalations, skitterings and paddings, a disorienting and placeless keening overarching all, but whether created by voice or natural sound remains undetermined. We are after all witnessing nature at her most serenely desolate...

The final half-hour track Ice Whispers endeavours (and succeeds in my opinion) to capture the essential moods of a frozen landscape, from sweeping freezing winds to calm motionless serenity and seeming stasis, building and building, where blizzards turn everything in sight to a blinding white nothing, and what was once familiar becomes transformed into a formless featureless blinding blanket of television static. It is also a narrative of possible catastrophe, when in an effort to stop the pestilential infection nature unleashes the strongest arsenal to wipe out the parasite as fully and as effectively as possible...

Yes there is a beauty to all the pieces on offer here, but more importantly there is also an unnerving undercurrent of cold menace lurking just behind the facade of prettiness, just like the staggeringly monolithic sculpted forms of the glaciers and icebergs gracing our TV screens in those National Geographic specials – we see them mostly in their benign aspect, picturesque and unthreatening, designed to elicit a response to their undoubted ‘ooh’ factor, but we must also be aware of the unseen strength and hidden danger, as the ghosts of the Titanic would be only too keen to remind us..

Recommended. (RATING 7/10)

[S:M:J63] by Wounds of Earth

Written by Matthew Spencer

Sunday, 02 December 2007

Two of ambient music's greatest strengths are conjuring up isolated locations and immense timelines. In Time Frost, Robin Storey uses them to imagine a Europe chilled by ocean currents altered by global warming. It is easy to be cynical about climate change as an artistic subject considering its status as Hollywood's pet-cause of the moment. Time Frost does something far more satisfying: it calls to mind vivid images that do not need to be interpreted through an ideology. Glacial MovementsConsidering the chilly subject matter, the album has a thick, full bodied sound. Storey used an old vinyl copy of Strauss' Blue Danube for much of the source material. Even though the piece is digitally processed beyond recognition, the richness of the orchestra and the snowy crackle of the record still remain. That analogue glow colors the sparse, unaccompanied loops, providing variety to the simple, repetitious song structures. Even in the arid, droning Horizon Discrete, the fluidity of Strauss' music remains intact, like the wind blowing up drifts from a glacier.The hypothetical waste-land that Storey envisions is not featureless and uniformly hostile. The time lapse waltz of Thin Light elegantly evokes a winter sunrise. Bubbly synthesizers mimic a thick, wet snow-shower in A Color of Darkness. Without shouting the message, these tracks suggest that the world's beauty will continue, even if it becomes too hostile for us to live on it.Despite a personal affinity for the natural world, music with environmental themes has always struck me as cheesy. Although the destruction humanity inflicts on the planet is truly dramatic, it is easier to make an episode of Captain Planet than a nuanced work of art. By remaining ambiguous, however, Time Frost has a much better chance of aging well than the bloated pontifications of Live Earth. Even if global warming is not your crusade, you can still sit back and enjoy this album. No moralizing is required.

BRAINWASHED

Robin Storey aka Rapoon is a former member of Zoviet France and currently part of The Reformed Faction (of ZF). The concept beyond this one is awesome - Storey infected and manipulated Johann Strauss' Blue Danube to describe Europe under a new ice age, with all the culture buried deep beneath the ice sheet. He used a 1968 vinyl edition of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odissey soundtrack to obtain the loops for the five compositions of Time Frost and you can hear even some vinyl crackles here & there and not one of them exists out of context. Basically all the compositions are short and have lots of textures and subtle movements except for Ice Whispers that clocks in at 35 minutes. Storey has been developing his solo material for approx. 15 years covering many styles with some highlights like his 1996 classic Darker By Light or the awesome and criminally underrated collaboration with Nocturnal Emission's Nigel Ayers under the name Hank & Slim - and some disappointing episodes like the experiments with clubby stuff on Klanggalerie. I'd say that Time Frost is probably his best effort in the ambient field so far. Out on the Italian label Glacial Movements, Time Frost comes packaged in a great digipack with a remarkable artwork created by Alessandra Clini on a picture by Bjarne Riesto.

CHAIN D.L.K.

Rapoon is the alter ego of robin storey who has been experimenting with textures for many many a year. this outing sees him tackle global warming via processing a crackly sample of strauss' blue danube. the result is, frankly, stunning. each of the five pieces cunningly evokes the slow freezing over of a landscape should a possible negative feedback occur due to global warming (google it, kids!). highly highly recommened, and if theres any justice, this will be on a few end of year 'best of' lists next year.750 cds only on italy's Glacial Movements.

ROUGH TRADE SHOP

Manipulated Strauss samples evoke a frozen Danube River on Robin Storey's latest offering.

With Time Frost, Rapoon founder (and former Zoviet France member) Robin Storey explores the idea of a future European ice age. Taking the iconic Danube River as his starting point, Storey imagines the river frozen solid. Marrying the imagery with the music, Storey takes sampled snippets of Johann Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz from vinyl lock grooves, loops them over one another, and processes them in the studio. The result is less static than one might expect, but then again, ice itself isn't as static as it appears. It grinds against itself, breaks off into sheets, compresses, forms ridges. Likewise, the fuzzy looped string tones of opening track Glacial Danube are similarly dynamic, degrading in time as they pan across the stereo channels. It's actually disconcerting, the way one tone will cut off sharply on one channel as another begins simultaneously on the other, sharp and jarring as frostbite. Things go deeper on Thin Light. The sound degrades less, because there's less of it to degrade; the high end, the tinny treble, is gone now, leaving only the icy depths and the melancholy mid-range. A Darkness of Snow deepens things further, tempting sleep with slow rolling distortion, and while Horizon Discrete starts off with the tension of sustained violins, it ends with a deep, almost oceanic drone. These admittedly fascinating pieces are, in a way, mere preludes to the final track, the half-hour epic Ice Whispers. Though it utilizes similar sounds and techniques to the earlier tracks, its length gives Storey the chance to move things at the truly glacial pace its subject matter deserves. Beginning with the omnipresent loops of scratchy violin, it fades into a deep, distorted tranquility, eventually adding hints of echoing clatter, like ice cracking under its own weight and amplified by the natural reverb of permanent winter. Storey's frozen landscapes do an excellent job of melding sound with concept, and if Time Frost is at times stark and inhospitable, it's a testament of how well he has executed his concept.

REGEN MAGAZINE