Lull - Cold Summer FLAC album

Curiously the opening track on this album starts off sounding like a piece from a CARPENTER film taken down a couple of octaves. Unlike later LULL explorations, this still retains a strong structure, and has quite a charming, pacifying warmth to it which envelops the listener in smoky-black heat. There's a similar feel to this piece as to the VIDNA OBMANA / STEVE ROACH "Well Of Souls" CD - slightly Mystical Eastern with flute like sounds climbing over the top like lonesome seagulls. The second track sounds more like a cross between the first "Dreamt About Dreaming" album and ART OF PRIMITIVE SOUND - bones crushed to dust on the cold stone floor of a cave while bodies move around in the shadows - machines are humming in the background which makes the dwellers in the dark Morlock-like. Track three moves into fragile places once more - deep underground, yet warm as the fires of Hell. It massages you softly, almost lovingly, but has as much hidden evil to it's purpose (I feel) as had the "Murder Ballads" albums. A similar feel - lulling, passive, promising peace and comfort, yet it has enough darkness to never completely put you at your ease. The fourth and final track is less focused than the previous pieces, less adherent to composition, relying more on drifting imagery, flowing sounds filling in the gaps within structures. As such it again sounds more like the driftwork explorations of "Murder Ballads".
In many ways I feel that this is the best of LULL's albums. While there are a lot of people doing similar work in the field of Dark Ambience (or Isolationism?), this album shows LULL to be at their most unique and powerful. It hangs in the uneasy space between cossetting beauty and dehumanized coldness. Personally I could listen to this for hours.

Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.

This is a rarefied and minimal ambient album. There are some drones of a dead nature that appear and fade away. You can hear fluted notes for an impossible ethnic music. There's a digital and analog taste that hides the notes. Sometimes some waters seem to flow away into the woods. Mick Harris made this album in isolation on April 1994. This is a charming and very hard record, at first listenings; but then, you enter in a world apart, where you can find the real, static, sense of nature; vibrations, spams and fires. Everything is in an undertone, and dreadful.