Music for Pictures by Motionfield (Review)

A lot of ambient music simply seems to content swirl and drift around the listener, trapping them, however delicately, within its gossamer folds. Contrast that with Motionfield’s latest, the Music for Pictures EP, which is marked by a definite progression through various moods and textures. The listener gets a good feel for this progression, and it’s various stages, with the song titles.

“The Colour of Water,” for example, is full of ebbing rhythms, aquamarine tones and dub-like rhythms that give the track a certain depth. It does come dangerously close to crossing over into New Age territory, especially when the ghostly whale songs meander through. Thankfully, it never quite gets that treacly.

“Falling In Stillness” combines the rustling sounds of falling rain with warm, Boards of Canada-like analog synth textures. Whereas the previous track conjured of blue ocean depths and sunlit tropical coasts à la Manual’s recent work, “Falling In Stillness” evokes some place a tad more fog-bound and autumnal.

While the first two tracks end on somewhat darker notes, “Northern Sky” remains rather dark and apprehensive through its length. This makes sense, however, seeing as how Petter Friberg, the man behind Motionfield, intended it to be an aural snapshot of long winter nights streaked by the colors of the Northern Lights. Muffled pulses form the song’s rhythmic backbone whilst shimmery synths flicker ever so briefly; in the song’s latter half, ghostly buzzings swarm through the song, evocative perhaps of the electromagnetic disturbances high overhead.

Although much of the album, despite its obvious synthetic sound sources, has a very organic feel to it, “Coffee Cargo” ends on a mechanized note, with the shuffling rhythms of a train. From there emerges a blend of Banco De Gaia’s acid house and 808 State’s loftier moments. And like the other tracks, the song’s final half again shifts the song’s perspective, with eerie analog squelches bubbling up and sliding all over each other.

It’s worth noting that none of Music for Pictures’s tracks stay static; each ends up in a very different place than where they started. The actual progression is perhaps not as graceful as it could be — some of the segues are abrupt, albeit in a very atmospheric way — but that may be more an issue of brevity as only one song on Music for Pictures passes the 6-minute mark. But that’s a minor quibble in my book. Those looking for some nice background music that isn’t simply boring wallpaper, but instead offers up some fairly interesting texture, could do far worse.

Plus, like all of Thinner/Autoplate’s music, it’s free to download (under the Creative Commons License, that is).

Music for Pictures can be downloaded from Archive.org.