Zakè & City of Dawn - Wander (review)
Chilly nature-based soundscapes get droned into the dirt and waste what could have been a monumental collaboration.
Score: 4/10
Composing ambient music is challenging. As Brian Eno said, “it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Making songs for multiple levels of listening requires hypnotic sound with delicate progression: timbre and subtlety are everything. Wander is a collaborative album between Indianapolis’s Zakè and McAllen’s City of Dawn: two drone/new-age artists with extensive discographies and inclusion in ambient music online communities. City of Dawn’s Damien Duque has even had news coverage, which is rare not just for a local musician, but an ambient one. After years of constant output, these two distant artists attempt to create imagery of and longing for faraway nature through walls of desolate drones and frigid undercurrents.
The first of three tracks, Wander, starts off well with a misty new-age chord droning, air hissing, and feedback ringing to give some tension within the beauty, and occasionally, a guitar swell breezes in and out (a signature element of any City of Dawn song.) What sounds like a great introduction never solidifies into anything. The song simply becomes less tense and a bit more silent at the end. The pretty drone alone is not enough to create a trance that justifies the 17 minute runtime.
In Shenandoah, an earthy drone creates a mesmerizing effect through gently ascending notes that don’t resolve, creating a sense that it could go on forever. The technique is great, but the song has nothing else to offer. The last track, Fernweh, creates ambient fatigue. The song sounds like anything you can find by YouTube searching “zen soundscapes,” with some Robin Guthrie guitars swirling around. The strong bass buzzing throughout makes it more engaging, but the methods are so drawn-out at this point, that the end feels like completing a marathon rather than a meditation session.
There’s no doubt these artists can create some pleasant timbre and spiritual resonance, if only those sounds can turn into songs instead of white noise. For a lengthy free-form album, the limited sonics and ideas can be disappointing. The songs are interchangeable to the point that even the 16+ minute runtimes are close together, and the constant dense blaring of sound leaves no room for any silence or dynamics.
This is not an attack on drone and ambient music in general, which has plenty of well-respected works and artists from Brian Eno, to Aphex Twin, and Burial. Long song lengths aren’t inherently bad either. The first song of William Basinki’s The Disintegration Loops is over an hour long and remains a watershed release.
Two artists who are worlds apart geographically are too similar musically. It’s hard to distinguish, but the first track is the only collaboration, with track two being Zakè’s and track three being City of Dawn’s. Instead of filling in what the other lacks, they dwell on what makes the music stay in place instead of travel through the landscapes they try to paint.
Score: 4/10
Listen to and purchase Wander here
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