Max Wurden – ST

Limited numbers on this one. 50 to be precise…. Come in a 4 panel clear tray digipak along with 7 photographic postcards on think card stock taken at locations of the field recordings used in the album….

Are you with me, or are you lost? That’s partly the question we can ask of Max Wurden’s mind and audience, and it’s surely an open question of the artform he is persuing on this very fine release from the Ambientmusic label. “Or Lost” is comprised of a dialectic sequence of sounds, ordered like poetry, sounding like poetry in motion – more of the structured love sonnet with a variation in stanza, written like a relationship with the stars…

How does Wurden defy blandness, then? He has several means to create euphoria, on the other hand. Through textural synchronicity with the sounds of a lake (“Is” especially), bubbling under the table, its metal legs withstanding “The” power of fluids, and what copes less competently with electricity at back of the bass, that causes the crackles throughout, he also experiments with track in/out styles, “Fulfilled” inviting of high pitched chirruping cuts, yolky noise to close.

If you have rules of lunacy, you’d be forgiven for breaking too many eggs to make an omelette. If you have Wurden’s rules, you break no more eggs than required, making the perfect weekend fryup music and music with transcendentally introspective longevity as well. The Ambientmusic label writes that Max Wuerden is looking for “Finding”, “the perfect moment” and this winter, with all it’s blustery weather forecasting haphazardness, is likely the best time in history for a release so perfect to arise from the snowy Narnia door. – Highly recommended!