The Echo Garden | review and label profile in Furthernoise
“Audiobulb is a Sheffield-based exploratory music label promoting the cause of innovative electronica. Label curator, David Newman, has overseen a flurry of activity over the past couple of years, and this profile features four of Audiobulb’s most recent releases, from a location-inspired compilation to a work driven by an experimental sound generator.
But first up there’s Irish electro-acoustician, Jimmy Behan, who blends pianos, chimes, and various synthetics with field recordings in cultivating the meditative spaces of The Echo Garden. A series of timbrel études and fragments of minimal drift enlivened by the patter of tiny tweets (e.g. Leaving Here), it creates a mood of ambient relaxation while avoiding the New Age fluffiness typically associated with such notions. Behan’s soundscapes generally shun the pristine and preset, preferring the lightly grained and marbled contour, the flickering and faded image-sound. Representative of this would be Rust, which finds a languorous wind chime coupling with filtered pads drizzled with some sizzle; or Clock for No Time, which lets tendrils of tones unravel over soft keyboard chords, gently modulating and interacting with field infusions. The Echo Garden is a study in light on water, rippling pond life and insectoid flutter: a work that makes a virtue of the limitations of a kind of faux-naïf palette of gentility and small gestures that seems to allude to the Zen-like atmosphere of a Japanese water garden.”