Milieu - Statuettes, Part Two (2020)

Statuettes, Part Two - five years fabled and finally here, a balm of pleasant ambient escapism from the abyssal world outside. Originally planned to be issued after Part One at Lee Norris' Txt label in the UK, the world moved on a bit, as it always does, and Part Two was displaced. Together, with Part One, these two albums represent a very personal level of happiness and achievement for me, as ambient music goes, but also as composition goes. I've written a lot of melodies since I first picked up a guitar in 1997, and I really feel that some of the best ones are on the Statuettes recordings.

The influences are probably obvious - the perennial Selected Ambient Works II, Jochem Paap's two beautiful albums on FAX, Ourson's Warming Plant, Irv Teibel's Tintinnabulation and so many others that I've visited and revisited for the better part of two decades. Given those things, the focus here is on warmth, melodic approachability and expressive environments that are gently coaxed out of rigid sequencers with a light hand. Some pieces incorporate microtonal elements, hand-tuned sounds that were played back in an unorthodox way using old samplers, while others are voices of analog and digital synthesizers, processed through filters, cassette tape, sunlight.

There isn't a lot to really say about Statuettes, beyond that I want these two albums to be considered as ambient compositions designed for pleasurable near-wakefulness. They make total sense to me in that liminal space between levels of awareness and sleep, when you've re-read a sentence on a yellowed paperback page five times and it still doesn't register that you've read it at all. When you're there, but you're not really here. These pieces each offer their own explorations of a scene, perhaps a garden, or a riverside, or a bedroom with a dim light, or an empty hotel lobby, or none of these things. Through the rounded tones and pillowy textures, an easy chair can become a cloud, a bed can become a waterfall, a quiet neighborhood can become a church