Time Rival - Oceans of Air (2020)

Triplicate Records owner Michael Southard returns with a mini album under his Time Rival moniker called "Oceans of Air". This is the 6th appearance of Time Rival on Triplicate and it couldn't have come at a better time. Lose yourself in subdued yet thought provoking melodies inside rich, evolving spaces.

************************
Oceans of Air was born out of experimentation with finding the hidden magic locked inside the Roland Juno DS-88. On its own, this can be a very capable stage piano, if not a little generic sounding. But once I started menu diving, I was able to massage and layer these sounds into something a bit more delicate, relaxed and intimate. Most of the harmonic textural parts on this album come from this.

Once I was able to create these textures, I began cutting, looping, and layering sounds I had captured with a field recorder like outdoor ambiances, construction equipment, and random foley sounds. Then I recorded small performances on some DIY instruments, as well as a Kaliimba I had received as a holiday gift (The main melody line in "Meteorology" is a chopped up kalimba performance, "Rosy" was written specifically to be performed on kalimba and was recorded in two takes) and really anything else I found laying around (vibraphone mallets on suspended metal chairs, hand drumming, clothing rustling).

Heavily effected electric and acoustic piano samples and custom Aalto patches played on top with a hefty dose of reverb and delay tie everything together into the musical collage you are hearing.

Special thanks to Bryan Kraft for helping with song selection and sequencing, Jonah Lawless for offering his well trained ears, George Evans for being an integral part of my musical journey, My lovely wife Melissa for her unending love and support, and my children who are a constant source of inspiration.

~Michael Southard (Time Rival)

************************
Time Rival, T-Rive, Rival of Time, Rive-Dogg... or, Mike Southard, Purveyor of the pianissimo, Sultan of the stretch has committed a colourful and vibrant catalogue of musical pieces to the collective sound-hole once again, this one is called 'Oceans of Air'. If you dabble in ambient music yourself you might be a little jealous that you didn't come up with that title. That's OK. It's been put to good use. The artist formally known as Supply Fi has been cultivating a complex and throroughly rewarding sound for years under all your noses, and now these drum-light stylings have eclipsed his other monikers. Supply Fi has gone on vacation, Time Rival is the inheritor.

Of course, this isn't a launch title; the man now has eight (!) stellar ambient LP's under his belt, not to mention four EP's. And that's just his flagship ambient project; Southard breathes tunes and offers no apologies. Stymieing one's creativity by committing an act as sacrilegious as controlling one's installable drive to produce sound is ill-advised, and thankfully for the lucky listener, that means you're likely getting a great new album from him with fairly short intervals in-between. It's time to examine what fine feathered wonders haunt the ethereal brine of 'Oceans of Air'.

Right from the opening fans of Southard's previous percussion-heavy work will be relieved to discover he hasn't abandoned his beat-appreciator sensibilities entirely. A pinpoint micro-house-esque shuffle dutifully anchors the roaming wilds of cloudy opener 'Derecho', the tempestuous connotations of the name betraying the dainty, wistful piano arpeggios littered throughout the second half of this wonderful six+ minute sprawl, floating peacefully into the slightly fraught slowcore menace of Meteorology. Anyone else sensing a theme developing here? It does feel somewhat like floating through some great maelstrom at times, or a literal Ocean of Air. It's safe to assume this was intentional.

After the briefest passage on the record, the irresistibly floaty goodness of 'Dirigible' with all it's implied spiritual vastness comes the centrepiece 'Clime', and with it, a hint of coldness hitherto untouched upon, icy tendrils wrapping what forward momentum had been earned into a phase of temporal stillness. His ability to bend time is an integral part of the lore at Triplicate Records, (There WILL be a test). Through muffled bells and a wall of wind, the light works feebly at bleeding through the cumulonimbus barrier, and coalesces with the rumblings in the lower register to give you the good goosebumps. But that's not the end, this one has legs. The clanging of bells echoing out through the final stretch ties it all together very nicely. Ethereal strokes materialize, phasing effortlessly into the flow and quickly dissolve back into the milky well while a formless momentum simulating pulse quivers beneath, beckoning your intrigue, keeping the absent beat.

Speaking of an absent beat, the following 'Rosy' holds possibly the least tenuous link to Southard's 'Supply Fi' days, despite the notable drop in tempo, there's an honest to god beat here. It's brittle, it's organic, it's exactly what it needed to be. Look, the guy famously enjoys his hip-hop, you're not getting a entirely drum-less ambient record Ok? And frankly, good. If people refer to the acid-happy 'Selected Ambient Works 85-92' as an ambient record, it's safe to say all bets are off. The light beat here is used effectively to weave together two giant pieces on either end. Speaking of which, on the other side we delve 'Inside the Chasm'. Murky shuffling sound fragments drift betwixt disembodied longing low-octave synth-lines here, as a faint, almost lullaby of a melody wanders into focus, all new age and likable; chasm nothing, you're floating through the Windows XP wallpaper and it's bliss. While bliss is the word of the minute, we should speak of the closer. 'Snow Fortress' is more than a bangin' title, it's a dense and mysterious construct of sadness, hope and the inevitable passage of time. Windswept rocks and auroras, a landscape painted white, the harshness of the ice lost in the depths of hypothermia, only for the soul to be lifted through a tunnel of dancing light.

Ultimately 'Oceans' feels less like a holding pattern, than it does a definite breaching of the unknown. Shooting for the sky and the sea simultaneously, Southard has conjured up a fruitful pastoral excursion through the essence of nature itself. That, or a totally solid ambient LP.

~George Evans - Triplicate Records