Artist: Ambient Animal
Title: Transcend
Format: Vinyl LP – 200 copies
Catalogue Number: sama004
Label: sama recordings
Release Date / Vinyl LP (200 copies): September 21st, 2020
Release Date / Digital Download: September 21st, 2020
Label Code: AT-AM6
Style: Electronica / Dub / Exotica / Pop / Techno
download official release info sheet here (.pdf format, english)
Press Text
Ambient Animal is the guise of sama recordings founder and curator Benedikt Guschlbauer. His first outing as a solo artist, “Transcend”, shows off the artist’s long-fermenting musical vision. Gently percussive and seemingly broadcast from a place of altered states, Ambient Animal’s music is electronic ritualism, manifesting an entire dreamworld from sparse keyboards and drum machines built around live jams. Besides the high-end swirls and bubbling sound effects of tracks like ‘Docking Manoeuvre’, everything from shades of spacey Italo-disco (‘Contemplating Reality’) and ambient spinning plates of fog-laden samples (‘Jackfruit’) enters the fray, coalescing around an intimate process of adding final touches to long dormant home recordings.
“Transcend” is an album about a metamorphosis for Ambient Animal. Having spent the last 10 or so years having fun recording improvised live sessions in his home studio and often leaving them unfinished, this is the moment viennese sound tinkerer Benedikt Guschlbauer finally dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s. The vision emerging from these rudimentary analogue mixer recordings is one of an expansive sonic universe.
Unbound by genre, “Transcend” takes its strategic cues from dub, exotica, and techno, brimming with colourful synthesizer pulsations and distant distorted rhythms encased in studio flare. The music sits somewhere between the blissful floors of clubs and temples, operating as a delicate soundtrack for navigating through the ecliptic constellation of Capricornus.
Text by Tristan Bath, August 2020
All music written, recorded, mixed & performed by Benedikt Guschlbauer in Vienna, Austria, 2018 – 2020