Not a sound sleep aid, because metal ambient can be so wonderfully horrible.
Ambient has degenerated into a self-care and self-optimization soundtrack, which only seems logical: Brian Eno conceived the music as an auditory wallpaper for airports. Jake Muir reinterprets ambient by looking for its sound sources elsewhere – in gay saunas or surf rock, for example. For PAREIDOLIA he now samples his way through death and black metal records.
In the best Illbient style, he cooks up guitar licks and growls into creamy sound textures that are contrasted by all sorts of sound effects. Here church bells seem to ring like they once did with the genre pioneers Black Sabbath, there it crackles like the soundtrack of a psychological horror film.
And although Muir creates light moments every now and then and the music on tracks like “Celestial Visions” Sounds calming and beautiful in places: the chopped up and disembodied vocal fragments that keep appearing make this album the opposite of a sound soporific for the after-work period. Ambient can be so wonderfully awful.
