Genre: Drone/Dark Ambient

Track Listing:

01 Beauty In Desolation Pt.1
02 Redshift
03 Requiem For Dead Spacemen
04 Beauty In Desolation Pt.2
05 Monolith

It took out ten months for Canadian musician Blake Gibson to gather the material for this debut album under the name of Broken Harbour. Honestly, I do not know much about him but the result is really impressive: a beautiful, deep, and very dark atmospheric ambient music, based on synthesizers, samplers and real time performances. Each of the five pieces of this CD is an hallucinatory narrative travel through time and space, with passages that are sometimes more ethereal and at other times quite gloomy. The work on sound is particularly meticulous and delicate. It is written on the backcover: « All glitches and extreme low frequencies are intentional and part of the composition, ideal listening is achieved by using either headphones or a subwoofer equipped stereo ».

If drone music can sometimes be quite boring, the organic and melancholy darkness of this CD is really addictive. If the first song « Beauty in Desolation pt.1 » is a fascinating floating song for the beginning of a travel into cosmic dimensions, the second song « Redshift » reveals to be quite darker, with its symphonic samples, moving low sounds and crackings which seem to come out from an old used vinyl record. The third song goes even further to describe a sense of desolation and isolation, almost painful and that can almost bring tears in eyes: « Requiem for Dead Spacemen ».

This is surely the most successful piece of this record. Quite strangely, we can hear the voice of Ronald Reagan emerging unexpectedly from this sadness. The fourth song is a following of the first one, « Beauty in Desolation pt2 » based on circular vibrating sounds which transform the vastness of space into a claustrophobic area. The word « beauty » should be changed here by the term « sublime », as philosopher Edmund Burke defined it in the eighteenth century: a feeling of delightful claustrophobic terror in front of the vastness and immensity of nature and cosmic elements, so well represented by the paintings of John Martin. For Gibson, this song is like « the musical equivalent of being sucked into a black hole ». « Monolith » concludes the CD with a tension that goes from uneasiness to haunting silence. A blurry, nebulous piece, so cold that it can make you shiver.

Broken Harbour is a good example of the best things that can emerge from the minimalist ambient drone scene.